Rousseau and Freedom

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Rousse au a n d Fr e e d om

Debates about freedom, an ideal continually contested, were first set out in their modern version by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His ideas and analyses were taken up during the philosophical Enlightenment, often invoked during the French Revolution, and still resonate in contemporary discussions of freedom. This volume examines Rousseau’s many approaches to the concept of freedom, in the context of his thought on literature, religion, music, theater, women, the body, and the arts. Its expert contributors cross disciplinary frontiers to develop thought-provoking new angles on Rousseau’s thought. By taking freedom as the guiding principle of their analysis, the essays form a cohesive account of Rousseau’s writings. c h r i s t i e mc d on a l d is Smith Professor of French Language and Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. s t a n l e y h of f m a n n is Paul and Catherine Buttenweiser University Professor in the Department of Government at Harvard University.

ROUSSEAU AND FR EEDOM e di t e d b y C hris t i e McD on a l d and S ta n l e y Hoffm a n n

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521515825 © Cambridge University Press 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN 13

978 0 511 71282 1

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN 13

978 0 521 51582 5

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgments List of abbreviations

page vii viii xii xiii

Introduction

1

Christie McDonald

Pa r t I

7

1 F reeing man from sin: Rousseau on the natural condition of mankind

9

Ioannis D. Evrigenis

2 Making history natural in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality

24

3 R ousseau’s Second Discourse: between Epicureanism and Stoicism

44

4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the late 1740s: satire, friendship, and freedom

58

5 If you please! Theater, verisimilitude, and freedom in the Letter to d’Alembert

77

6 Music, the passions, and political freedom in Rousseau

92

Natasha Lee

Christopher Brooke

Marian Hobson

Jérôme Brillaud

Tracy B. Strong

v

vi

c on t e n t s

Pa r t i i

111

7 The Social Contract, or the mirage of the general will

113

8 “Par le bon usage de ma liberté”: freedom and Rousseau’s reconstituted Christianity

142

9 The constraints of liberty at the scene of instruction

159

10 “Toutes mes idées sont en images”: Rousseau and the yoke of necessity

174

11

Rousseau’s ruins

193

12 Can woman be free?

207

13 The subject and its body: love of oneself and freedom in the thought of Rousseau

216

Pa r t i i i

229

14 Paranoia and freedom in Rousseau’s final decade

231

15

245

Stanley Hoffmann

Jason Neidleman

Diane Berrett Brown

Marius Hentea Louisa Shea

Philip Stewart

Mathieu Brunet and Bertrand Guillarme

Leo Damrosch

Freedom and the project of idleness

Pierre Saint-Amand

16 On the uses of negative freedom

257

17 Fail better: Rousseau’s creative délire

274

292

Marie-Hélène Huet Christie McDonald

Postface: Rousseau and freedom

Stanley Hoffmann

Bibliography Index

295 309

Illustration

4.1 Front board and title page of Sir William Petty, Several Essays in Political Arithmetick (London, 1699; SRAFFA 293), showing dedication from Rousseau to Diderot. Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

vii

page 60

Notes on contributors

di a n e be r r e t t brow n, an independent scholar and editor, has recently published articles on Rousseau, Mercier, and Fénelon. She is completing a book manuscript, Private Lessons: Enlightenment Education and the Eighteenth-Century French Novel, that considers the trajectory of the eighteenth-century novel in terms of educational experiments and pedagogical imperatives. j é rôm e br i l l au d is the author of Sombres Lumières: essai sur le retour à l’antique et la tragédie grecque au dix-huitième siècle as well as articles on Ancien Régime theater, travel narratives, and eighteenthcentury philosophy. He is currently writing a book on simplicity and Enlightenment thought. He teaches at Vanderbilt University. c h r i s t oph e r bro ok e is a lecturer in political theory and the history of political thought at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of King’s College. His work has appeared in The Historical Journal, Grotiana, the New Left Review, Les Etudes philosophiques, and elsewhere; and he has recently completed his first book, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and the Politics of Self-Love from Lipsius to Rousseau. m at h i e u bru n e t is Associate Professor at the University of Provence (Aix–Marseille I). He is the author of L’Appel du monstrueux: pensées et poétiques du désordre en France au XVIIIe siècle (2008) and of numerous articles on eighteenth-century French literature. l e o da m ro s c h is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard, where he has served as Chair of the Department of English and was awarded a Harvard College Professorship for distinguished teaching. Among his books are Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth, God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding, Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson, and The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on viii

no t e s on c on t r i bu t or s

ix

the Free Spirit. Most recently, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award and winner of the PEN New England Award for nonfiction. ioa n n i s d. e v r ig e n i s is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. He is co-editor of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings, as well as the author of articles on a wide range of issues in the history of political thought, and of Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which received the 2009 Delba Winthrop Award for Excellence in Political Science. be r t r a n d gu i l l a r m e is Professor of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of Paris (Paris VIII – Saint-Denis). He has published Rawls et l’ égalité démocratique (1999) and Penser la Peine (2004). m a r i us h e n t e a (BA Columbia, PhD Harvard) has recently completed his doctoral dissertation on international morality in the political thought of Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. He is currently writing a PhD in English literature at the University of Warwick as well as working on a biography of Tristan Tzara (forthcoming). m a r i a n hob s on CBE is Professorial Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She was formerly Lecturer in French, University of Cambridge, the first woman Fellow of Trinity College, and maître-assistante at the University of Geneva. A specialist of the European Enlightenment, and present-day literary theory and criticism, Hobson is the author of many books, among them Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (1998) and L’Art et son objet: Diderot, la théorie de l’ illusion et les arts en France au xviiie siècle (2007). s ta n l e y hof f m a n n is the Paul and Catherine Buttenweiser University Professor at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1955. He was the Chair of the Center for European Studies at Harvard from its creation in 1969 until 1995. Professor Hoffmann was born in Vienna in 1928. He lived and studied in France from 1929 to 1955; he graduated from the Institut d’études politiques of Paris and received a doctorate in law from Paris Law School. At Harvard, he teaches French intellectual and political history, American foreign policy, the sociology of war, international politics, ethics and world affairs, modern political ideologies, the development of the modern state, and the history of Europe

x

No t e s on c on t r i bu t or s since 1945. His latest book is Chaos and Violence: What Globalization, Failed States and Terrorism Mean for U.S. Foreign Policy (2006).

m a r i e -h é l è n e h u e t is M. Taylor Pyne Professor of French at Princeton University. Her recent books include Rehearsing the Revolution, The Staging of Marat’s Death (1982), Monstrous Imagination (1993; winner of the Harry Levin Prize in Comparative Literature), and Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (1997). She has published a number of articles on Rousseau and is currently finishing a book on ethics and the Enlightenment. n ata s h a l e e is an Assistant Professor of French Literature in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University, and holds the Laurence S. Rockefeller preceptorship at the University Center for Human Values. Her primary interests lie in the Enlightenment and its legacies, and the dialogue of literature and criticism with other disciplines, above all political theory and history of science. She has written several articles on Rousseau, as well as on eighteenth-century literature and its relation to scientific discourses. She is currently completing a manuscript on human classification in the French Enlightenment and on the implications of thinking social questions in scientific terms. c h r i s t i e mc d on a l d is the Smith Professor of French Language and Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where she has served as Chair in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Her research and teaching focus is on eighteenth- and twentieth-century French literary and philosophical thought. She has also published in the areas of ethics, feminist theory, and the arts. Her publications include The Extravagant Shepherd (1973, 2007) on Rousseau, The Dialogue of Writing (1985) on eighteenth-century dialogue; Dispositions (1986) on music and textuality; and The Proustian Fabric (1991). Among other edited works, she has published The Ear of the Other (1982, 1985), Transformations in Personhood and Culture after Theory (1994), Images of Congo (2005), and Painting My World (2009). French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, edited with Susan Suleiman, is forthcoming in 2010. j a s on n e i dl e m a n is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of La Verne, where he teaches political theory. He is author of The General Will is Citizenship: Inquiries into French Political Thought (2001), as well as articles on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Michel Foucault. He is currently at work on a monograph on Rousseau and truthseeking.

no t e s on c on t r i bu t or s

xi

pi e r r e s a i n t-a m a n d is Francis Wayland Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His publications include Diderot: le labyrinthe de la relation (1984), The Libertine’s Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-century French Novel (1994), and The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment (1996). He recently edited Thérèse philosophe (2000) and Confessions d’une jeune fille in Romanciers libertins du xviiie siècle (2005). He has just completed a manuscript tentatively entitled “Paresse des Lumières.” l ou i s a s h e a received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and is currently Assistant Professor in the Departments of Comparative Studies and French and Italian at Ohio State University. Her book, The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon is forthcoming. ph i l i p s t e wa r t specializes in the French novel and intellectual history of the Enlightenment and is a member of the Editorial Board of SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century). His books include Imitation and Illusion in the French Memoir-Novel, 1700–1750 (1969), Le Masque et la parole: le langage de l’amour au xviiie siècle (1973), editions of Prévost’s Cleveland (1977, 2003), two books of critical readings (Rereadings: Eight Early French Novels, 1984, and Half-told Tales: Dilemmas of Meaning in Three French Novels, 1987). He has published translations of Rousseau and Lee Smith and published a book and numerous articles on literary illustration. t r ac y b. s t rong is the author of several books including Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (third edition, 2001), The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space (1990), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary (1995, 2000); as well as the editor or co-editor of Nietzsche’s New Seas (1988, 1990), The Self and the Political Order (1991), Public Space and Democracy (2001), The One and the Many: Ethical Pluralism in Contemporary Perspectives (2003), and Nietzsche (2009). He has written numerous articles and essays in a variety of journals. He is currently working on a book on aesthetics and politics in the early twentieth century; on a series of essays which reads figures in the political theory canon as participant in contemporary concerns; and on music, language, and politics in the period that extends from Rousseau to Nietzsche. From 1990 until 2000 he was editor of Political Theory.

Acknowledgments

This book grew out of a conference held at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, that surpassed all expectations. We are grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for giving us the opportunity to meet in the splendid Center situated on Lake Como. We would like to thank Pina Palacia, the Managing Director, Nadia Gilardoni, Conference Coordinator, and the whole team who took such good care of all the participants while we were there. We would also like to express our gratitude to the Florence Gould Foundation whose generous grant made travel to Italy possible for our junior colleagues. Tali Zechory was assistant to the conference in Bellagio and for this volume. We thank her for her enthusiasm, her help at every stage, and for her commitment to this important field as dix-huitiémiste. Laurie Calhoun, editor of Transition Magazine, oversaw the extensive first stage of copy-editing for the manuscript, and Rebecca du Plessis of Cambridge University Press the second; we are most grateful to both for their meticulous work.

xii

Abbreviation

OC Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1995).

xiii

Introduction Christie McDonald

This book began with the sense that freedom, one of the longest-standing ideals in the West, is in today’s world increasingly compromised and a subject for deep concern; revisiting the past, and thereby bringing it into the present, can provide a means of reflecting on this issue beyond the soundbite. Debates about freedom were first set out in their modern version by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who sought to investigate the relationship between freedom and equality in two potentially conflicting arenas: that of humankind and that of citizen. His ideas and analyses were taken up during the philosophical Enlightenment, were often invoked during the French Revolution, and still resonate, we believe, in contemporary discussions of freedom. In English we use the words “freedom” and “liberty” interchangeably. Rousseau received the word and concept of liberté as it had developed from the Greek eleutheria and the Latin libertas (“freedom”) libertus (“freedman”). The political sense of freedom, how much or how little should be allowed, goes back to the Greeks, as do questions of social dependence and about inner freedom as a means to happiness. The meaning of the related words libertin and libertinage in French, derived from libertinus (“pertaining to a freedman”), evolved from “freed slave” to one who indulges in excessive freedom concerning religious matters and, later, to intellectual and sexual freedom; Rousseau brings all of these meanings into play within different contexts. He inscribes the history of the concept and the word through metaphors of enslavement and yoking in order to test the possibilities and limits of freedom for the individual and within society. The Second Discourse opens with the Delphic oracle’s exhortation to “know thyself,” setting forth a program to re-examine not only polit ical and social structures but the tensions and contradictions of inner life that underpin these structures as well. Throughout his works, Rousseau writes about the conditions for and the constraints on liberty as he formulates ways in which to change the 1

2

C h r i s t i e Mc D on a l d

relationship of the individual to society. In this volume, we challenge the sense of an “either–or” philosophy that opposes the private and the public, the mind and the body. These essays show that, contrary to a Jacobin or “totalitarian” interpretation of Rousseau’s work, according to which the individual has little or no place, Rousseau’s writings reflect on the role of feeling and passion in relation to reason, free will in relation to nat ural goodness, and a practice of being in the world necessary to existence. Rousseau offers not one, but several conceptions of liberty. The authors here explore how different forms of liberty emerge in Rousseau’s writings from the early to the late works. First, there is the liberty of man in the state of nature, before the development of a moral sense and of a social sense going beyond compassion. Second, there is the liberty of man in a perfect society – the society described in the Social Contract, in which man is part of a community ruled by the general will: Anyone who dares to institute a people must feel capable of, so to speak, chan ging human nature; of transforming each individual who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole into part of a larger whole from which that individual would, as it were, receive his life and his being; of weakening man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; of substituting a partial and moral existence for the independent and physical existence we have all received from nature. In a word, he must take from man his own forces in order to give him forces which are foreign to him and of which he cannot make use without the help of others.1

This is Rousseau’s conception of what Isaiah Berlin will later call “positive liberty,”2 of what Benjamin Constant had called “la liberté des anciens.”3 It goes further than the democratic citizen’s participation in community decisions; it involves almost a fusion with the other citizens’ notion of the common good. Third, and finally, when society is imperfect – based not on the general will but on fraud or force – or when it is corrupt and decadent, as was the case, Rousseau believed, for the society within which he lived, there is still a third kind of freedom: not that of the citizen, but that of the individual, now endowed with a sense of morality, and trying to live (along with his family) an independent life amidst an unsavory society. This third sense of freedom merges with an autonomous sense of will and the development of an inner moral life based on sentiment and individual reason more flexible than its rigid universalization would suggest. This volume explores these various forms of liberty and how they differ from one another. Rousseau experiments with the idea that men and women try to be both citizens (part-time) and private individuals, and even form private groups. He has been read as a firm enemy both

Introduction

3

of representation and of parties – exemplifying a conflict between the liberalism characteristic of British and French Enlightenment thinkers. But does Rousseau really go so far, or can we not also be individuals, and form groups in all the areas not included in the realm of the general will? In other words, is the city of the Social Contract a preview of a totalitarian Orwellian nightmare, or is it an idealized form of the Swiss cantons? This volume grew out of a conference held in May 2007 at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. The authors include both social scientists and humanists, and, although sometimes scholars in these two disciplines speak quite different languages, the conference participants exchanged thoughts and interpretations based on common areas of inquiry from productively different perspectives. It was a magical few days, not only because of the beauty of the location, but because something wonderful happened intellectually during the sessions that could not have been predicted. Many of the essays directly question or go beyond traditional readings of Rousseau’s work on the problem of freedom. From varying points of view, they show that concern with both the word and the concept of freedom runs from the beginning of his anthropological work, through the great sociopolitical works, to the final autobiographical writings. If, historically, the anthropological writings have often been read in departments of anthropology and sociology, the sociopolitical works in departments of political science, and the novel ( Julie, or the New Heloïse) and final autobiographical works in literature departments, we believe that these essays demonstrate the need to reach across the disciplines in order to understand the diverse meanings of “freedom” for Rousseau, and the way in which he elaborates them. Reading them across disciplines – the autobiographical with the sociopolitical, the anthropological with the literary – the essays address the role of music, pedagogy, politics, philosophy, and the place of religion. That Rousseau deliberately blurred the lines between the public and the private is part of what fascinates readers about his ideas. That he continues to provoke readers (whether negatively or positively), for example on such issues as the role of women in society, there is little doubt. Rousseau continually turned from the real to the ideal as a triggering mechanism for his innovative thinking: “Let us … begin by setting all the facts aside…”4 Here is the call to a methodology of hypothesis and theory beyond experience and historical evidence – even though Rousseau himself draws incessantly on both. He gave up his own children yet wrote a novel-treatise about pedagogy; he suffused his writings with the metaphor

4


of slavery5 while largely ignoring the reality of a flourishing slave trade – to name only two salient examples. The turn toward an abstracted form of thought has also endured through the French Revolution to the present, whether revered or resisted. The essays included here bring out, among other things, the import ance of hypothesis and conjecture in Rousseau’s works; what is taken as given and what contingent in his rewriting of history; definitions of nature and natural law, and the invention of sociopolitical thought; how Rousseau read authors from antiquity and foreshadowed thought from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. They reflect upon the language with which he discusses freedom, equality, and the status of the human; the individual in relation to others within the social context; the role of affect in analyzing the human condition; and what it means to reflect on inner freedom, or conscience, in the context of shared humanity. Important to this volume is the sense that, far from abandoning his first work in his last, Rousseau arrived at a sense of internal freedom within the individual through the logic of the works that he had already written. This does not mean that one can find a linear, causal relationship between one work and the next; Rousseau’s thought makes logical leaps from one work to another, and creates ruptures even within a single work. Nor can one explain fully how a thought or work came about through the authors and the works that Rousseau read (he read widely, but also selectively and critically), or through his biography, although the relationship of his biography to his autobiography is clearly important. Rather, what this means is that Rousseau confronts questions about freedom and necessity, individual conscience, and social relations within the public sphere in complex and important ways. He offers a panoply of ideas that continue to enrich us today as we engage with our present-day concerns about individuals within vastly differing societies. no t e s 1 Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. by V. Gourevitch (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 69. 2 I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–73. 3 B. Constant, Political Writings, trans. and ed. by Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 302–7. 4 Rousseau “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. R. D. Masters and C. Kelly, 12 vols. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990– ).

Introduction

5

5 O. Patterson’s Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991) and K. Raaflaub’s The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece (University of Chicago Press, 2004) give a sense of the long history of the concept of freedom and the metaphor of slavery; C. L. Miller’s The French Atlantic Triangle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) analyzes the relationship between culture and the actual slave trade.

pa rt i

Ch apter 1

Freeing man from sin: Rousseau on the natural condition of mankind Ioannis D. Evrigenis

Men are wicked; a sad and constant experience makes proof unnecessary; yet man is naturally good, I believe I have proved it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1

In 1753, the Academy of Dijon wondered, “What is the origin of inequality among men?” and “whether it is authorized by natural law.”2 Surprised by the Academy’s audacity, Rousseau took it upon himself to respond with a treatise so much longer than what the Academy had asked for, that his entry was dismissed without being read in its entirety by the jury.3 The length of what came to be known as the Second Discourse, however, is not its only curious characteristic. This work is extraordinarily fragmented: according to Rousseau’s own divisions of the text, it consists of (1) an epistle dedicatory; (2) a preface; (3) an exordium; (4) Part i; (5) Part ii; and (6) Rousseau’s notes. In addition to these parts, the reader is faced with a frontispiece, a title page which contains a second picture and an epigraph from Aristotle’s Politics, a rather curious note on the notes, as well as an explicit challenge to choose the correct path through the work, and thereby avoid joining the ranks of the “vulgar Readers.”4 These structural curiosities, in turn, house certain well-known substantive oddities, the most notorious of which is the relationship between Part i and Part ii of the Discourse. Therein, Rousseau proposes to seek out natural man by means of an extended examination of his natural condition. Yet, in his hands, the state of nature – which is usually but a brief prelude to political theories – becomes a drawn-out story that begins in one set of colors and ends much later, in very different shades.5 Commentators have pointed to these and many other challenges, and have offered a broad range of interpretations of this difficult work. These vary widely, but as Christopher Kelly has pointed out, they tend to share one characteristic: they attempt to make sense of the Second Discourse by “explaining away parts of [Rousseau’s] argument.”6 Thus, to take but 9

10

Ioa n n i s D. E v r ig e n i s

one example, commentators often choose between two parts of the work that seem impossible to reconcile, Part i and Rousseau’s notes, dismissing the one and stressing the significance of the other. As if difficulties with what Rousseau does offer in the Second Discourse were not enough, one has to consider also the significance of certain conspicuous absences. For instance, as Robert Wokler observes, it is more than a little curious that Rousseau is virtually silent therein when it comes to two related themes that are central to the rest of his oeuvre, music and religion.7 After all, Rousseau claims in the Confessions that the Second Discourse was a work “of the greatest importance,” in which he was able to develop his principles “completely,” and he insists at every opportunity that those principles are always and everywhere the same.8 The most challenging problem with this work, however, as Victor Gourevitch notes, is “how to make coherent sense of what Rousseau says about the state of nature: is it conjectural or is it factual?”9 Having charged state-of-nature theorists with a failure to reach the true natural condition of mankind, Rousseau sets out to do so himself.10 The result is the “pure state of nature” of Part i, a condition which no longer exists, which perhaps never did exist, which probably never will exist, and about which it is nevertheless necessary to have exact Notions in order accurately to judge of our present state.11

Skeptical readers might wonder whether Rousseau’s return to the state of nature is merely a bow to literary convention, but there is ample reason to think otherwise. For Rousseau, [The] study of original man, of his true needs, and of the fundamental principles of his duties is also the only effective means available to dispel the host of difficulties that arise regarding the origin of moral inequality, the true foundations of the Body politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and a thousand similar questions, as important as they are badly elucidated.12

Rousseau may sound as though he is exaggerating here, but I wish to suggest that he means what he says about the significance of the state of nature quite literally. The first question, then, that requires an answer is the one that Kelly asks: what does Rousseau mean when he tells us that the pure state of nature “perhaps never did exist”? Kelly argues that to understand Rousseau’s peut-être properly, we have to take “ser iously the actual possibility, but not necessarily the historical reality, of the pure state of nature.”13 This crucial distinction allows us to begin to untangle the relationship between the two states of nature of the Second Discourse.

Freeing man from sin

11

N at u r a l m a n On the frontispiece of the Second Discourse, the reader finds two clues as to the meaning of the pure state of nature, which usually pass unnoticed. The first of these is a quotation from Aristotle’s Politics, which warns that it is necessary to observe what is by nature not in the corrupted but rather in those things that are in accordance with nature.14 The second clue appears to be unintentional, since in the first edition of the Second Discourse the quotation is attributed to Book ii, rather than Book i of the Politics, which is the correct source.15 Aristotle makes this statement in the context of his controversial discussion of slavery, so Rousseau’s choice of this text as his epigraph might be interpreted as a comment on the human condition. It is, in fact, a statement of method for Rousseau, just as it is for Aristotle. Aristotle’s discussion of slavery in the Politics is as good an example as any of why this method is contentious. If there is such a thing as nat ural slavery, then some slaves are properly enslaved, and some are not. As Aristotle explains, observing a wide variety of actual slaves in very different circumstances is, by itself, insufficient if we want to assess them thus. In addition to that information, one would have to know something about the nature of man and the nature of a slave, and only a comparison between these and the actual cases would permit one to judge whether a particular slave was so by nature or not. This kind of comparison is essential to Aristotle’s procedure in every area of inquiry. In Book ii of the Politics, to which Rousseau’s publisher, Rey, misattributes the original statement, for example, Aristotle explains that in order to understand forms of government and their suitability to different circumstances, one must know not only those circumstances and actual regimes, but also others that have been proposed in speech and are thought to be good.16 In that context, Aristotle is thinking of Plato’s Republic, which he proceeds to criticize, but, more generally, he considers it the task of any branch of knowledge to know not only what is actual but, first and foremost, what is the best without qualifications or restrictions.17 Where the nature of things is concerned, it is clear why these signposts would matter. To use the example invoked most often in this regard, knowing that it is in the nature of an acorn to become an oak tree, one can proceed to characterize the careers of different acorns as natural or unnatural, successful or unsuccessful, and so on. Extending this logic to human nature invites all kinds of trouble, but it is clear that the author of the prize-winning First Discourse is far from reluctant to do so. What is

12


at stake in the determination of the true natural condition of mankind? If natural man is A, actual specimens of the A variety can be pronounced natural, whereas specimens of the M and Y varieties can be ruled devi ations. In fact, however, this determination is far more contentious, since Rousseau’s description of that natural condition is not offered in a vacuum; where the rest of the world says that natural man is one thing, Rousseau wants to say that he is something altogether different. T wo va r i e t i e s of m i s a n t h rop y Attempting to temper the negative reaction to what readers interpreted as his suggestion that human beings are evil by nature, Hobbes declared, we cannot tell the good and the bad apart, hence even if there were fewer evil men than good men, good, decent people would still be saddled with the constant need to watch, distrust, anticipate and get the better of others, and to protect themselves by all possible means.18

Hobbes’s backhanded compliment did little to make those good, decent people feel better, and this situation presented Rousseau with an odd problem. Having realized that “[i]t is not so much what is horrible and false as what is just and true in [Hobbes’s] politics that has made it odious,” Rousseau was clearly aware of the limits that Hobbes’s reputation imposed on the effectiveness of his message.19 If that message contained something useful, then that would have to be dissociated from Hobbes in order to be made appealing. As it turns out, Rousseau found much that was useful in Hobbes, but, as he was preparing to respond to the Academy’s question, Hobbes’s most significant bequest was his unassailable demonstration that men are by nature equal.20 The only problem was that, in the state of nature, as Hobbes saw it, natural equality led very quickly to a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”21 Regardless of where one situates Rousseau in relation to his near contemporaries, there is widespread agreement that he, along with more or less everyone else, at least felt the need to adopt a Hobbist vocabulary and to engage Hobbes. Beyond that, however, most commentators would proceed to place Rousseau and Hobbes in opposite camps rather quickly.22 Rousseau’s treatment of Hobbes in the Second Discourse is perhaps most responsible for this classification, since therein Rousseau identifies Hobbes as the chief culprit among those who misunderstand and misuse the concept of the state of nature.23 All those who had resorted to the study of the state of nature before him, Rousseau argues, had committed the same


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type of error: they failed to reach it, because they “transferred to the state of Nature ideas they had taken from society; They spoke of Savage Man and depicted Civil man.”24 These mistakes were not all equally pernicious, however, and none was as problematic as Hobbes’s, which implied strongly that natural man was wicked: Hobbes did not see that the same cause that keeps Savages from using their reason, as our Jurists claim they do, at the same time keeps them from abusing their faculties, as he himself claims they do; so that one might say that Savages are not wicked precisely because they do not know what it is to be good; for it is neither the growth of enlightenment nor the curb of the Law, but the calm of the passions and the ignorance of vice that keep them from evil-doing; so much more does the ignorance of vice profit these than the knowledge of virtue profits those.25

Hobbes’s mistake, according to Rousseau, came from his inability to distinguish between amour de soi-même, a love of self that is natural and that leads to a concern with self-preservation, and amour propre, a love of self that arises only in relation to others, a sentiment that is factitious, and born in society, which inclines every individual to set greater store by himself than by anyone else, inspires men with all the evils they do one another, and is the genuine source of honor.26

Rousseau’s distinction between these two sentiments allows him to concede that man is concerned with himself, while avoiding having to conclude with Hobbes that that concern leads to competition with others.27 Equally importantly, however, it provides a further clue as to the Aristotelian character of Rousseau’s division between the pure state of nature, of Part i, and the subsequent state of nature, of Part ii. If man’s amour propre is an internal characteristic that becomes activated when man comes into contact with other men, then it is possible to speak of two different states, one in which amour propre is active, and one in which it is not. Whether or not a time existed during which man’s amour propre was dormant does not matter. What matters is the theoretical possibility of such a time, and, in denying it, Hobbes had come dangerously close to an altogether different variety of misanthropy, that associated with Original Sin.28 It is impossible, but also largely unnecessary, to explain here the significance of the doctrine of Original Sin. It suffices to note that, beginning with Paul’s epistle to the Romans, man’s Fall began to serve as the basis for answers to Christian theology’s most vexing questions.29 Why do the innocent suffer and die? Why did God allow Rome to be sacked by the Visigoths? Why is there inequality and despotism? These and many other

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difficult questions received answers that began and ended with Original Sin.30 Although there was disagreement about much in those answers, there was very little disagreement regarding the miserable condition of fallen man.31 As the otherwise optimistic Calvinist theologian Jean La Placette put it, “one does not have to be a bigot or a misanthrope … to remain convinced that the world is in a pitiful state.”32 Rousseau’s rad ical departure from the conventional approach to the state of nature was the consequence of his realization that the only way to avoid reaching Hobbist conclusions was to free man from the yoke of Original Sin.33 A Di s c ou r s e of I n e qua l i t y One might expect to find Rousseau discussing Original Sin in the work in which he considers original man, yet the Second Discourse contains no mention of it. As Robert Wokler notes, Rousseau had initially intended to close the Discourse with a passage on religion, one of the two subjects generally, and conspicuously, absent from the final text, but in the end he removed it.34 Two fragments that survive, however, indicate that therein he lamented “mankind’s endeavour to rise up from the domain of beasts to that of angels,” and argued that “if Heaven itself had not spoken, and if the Revealed voice of God had not taught men about the religion they should follow, there might have been no limit to the miseries inflicted on mankind by priests.”35 As it turns out, Rousseau was given another opportunity to consider this great theme, and he took it, in his “Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris,” on the occasion of the latter’s condemnation of Emile. Rousseau was no stranger to controversy, but the outrage that followed Emile was extraordinary. Rendering him at once too pious for the philosophes but also too impious for the dévots, the inclusion of the Savoyard Vicar’s profession of faith in that work made Rousseau enemies on all sides.36 Of their various attacks, Beaumont’s was one that Rousseau owed it to himself to answer.37 That answer is remarkable for several reasons, but the most important of these is the light that it sheds on the Second Discourse. The title page of Rousseau’s response announces the inequality of the contest: the citizen of Geneva is responding to the “Archbishop of Paris, Duke of St. Cloud, Peer of France, Commander of the Order of the Holy Spirit, Patron of the Sorbonne, etc.,” and Rousseau begins by wondering what one can have to say to the other, whether they can speak the same language or even understand one another.38 Rousseau’s reply to Beaumont and the parlement of Paris, which had denounced his book, is one of


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surprise and bewilderment at the interest that a Catholic body in France takes in a Genevan’s work published in Holland.39 Nevertheless, Rousseau sees the Archbishop’s letter as an opportunity to explain that, despite the several accusations that were leveled against him over the years, his works have been attempts to examine various subjects, “but always with the same principles: always the same morality, the same belief, the same maxims, and if you will the same opinions.”40 At their core, these opinions stem from a “fundamental principle of all morality”: “that man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; that there is no original perversity in the human heart, and that the first movements of nature are always right,” a principle that Rousseau demonstrated in the Second Discourse.41 This starting point for the negative education of Emile would seem uncontroversial; a welcome antidote to the whiff of misanthropy that emanated from Hobbes. Yet, as Rousseau knew full well, this was a foundation that Beaumont could not accept because it amounted to a denial of Original Sin.42 Rousseau’s response to Beaumont covers a lot of ground, but three related themes deserve special attention because of the light that they shed on the Second Discourse: (1) the doctrine of Original Sin and its relation to evil; (2) the status of Revelation and its use and abuse by the clergy; and (3) the story of creation and its relationship to speculative histories such as Rousseau’s pure state of nature. Claiming Scripture and reason as the “unique rules” of his belief, Rousseau insists that his disagreement with the theologians regarding natural man is of the utmost importance.43 Once these two rules are coupled, one cannot but agree with the Savoyard Vicar, that certain tenets of the church’s doctrine are problematic. If the dévots find evidence in the Scriptures to support every part of the doctrine of the church, Rousseau is not ready to follow them, yet he explains that the absence of such an unshakeable faith does not lead him to dismiss revelation either. The difficulties on the other side are just as great, and his heart – the gauge he trusts most – tells him to accept it.44 Calling himself a Christian of the Gospel, not of the priests, and a disciple of Jesus, Rousseau proclaims his refusal to bow down to the clergy.45 To Beaumont, he presents himself as a man with a consistent position, with no interests to advance, and nothing to hide.46 Rousseau makes a point of insisting that his writings are consistent with one another and that he is everywhere developing the same themes, but there is stronger evidence to link the “Letter to Beaumont” to the Second Discourse. He claims at the outset that it was the Archbishop’s objection, drawn as it is from the dawn of history, that led him to “seek [his] replies

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from afar also.”47 A return to the dawn of time, then, is in order, but one that will this time around include an explicit consideration of the Biblical evidence. Rousseau’s first remark is far from measured: it is not at all certain, in my view, that this doctrine of original sin, subject as it is to such terrible difficulties, is contained in the Scriptures either as clearly or as harshly as it has pleased the Rhetorician Augustine and our Theologians to construct it.48

For Rousseau, the fundamental difficulty with the doctrine of Original Sin is that it fails to explain its own principle. If it is true that we are all sinners because of Adam’s sin, why was Adam a sinner? Finding it incomprehensible that God would condemn human beings for a quality that is the product of His order, Rousseau admits to giving sin a different origin than the theologians do. Whereas they assert man’s wickedness, he demonstrates how it came about.49 To do so, Rousseau has to go back to natural man, whom he sees as devoid of reason, a faculty that he acquires only gradually and slowly.50 Beaumont counters that Rousseau’s solitary savage does not exist, but Rousseau argues that that does not matter. What matters is that “he may exist in assumption.”51 Why is this controversy so significant? Rousseau argues that there are two ways to examine religions: by looking at their truth and falsity, and “their temporal and moral effects on earth, according to the good or evil they can do for society and the human race.”52 To assume that the truest religion is also the most social would be a mistake, and Rousseau sees great difficulties in reconciling such an assumption with the facts. Human history is littered with wars of religion, and there is abundant evidence that the dominant religions have “cruelly wounded humanity.” In considering the endless persecutions and sacrifices of blood that every religion offers to its God, Rousseau realizes that they result not from a zeal for salvation, but from amour propre and pride. The only way to remove the “dagger from intolerance” is to free people from the fear and intimidation imposed by priests, and allow them to reason about religion. In Emile, Rousseau provides the means for the first step. He aims to make each more circumspect from within his own Religion about accusing others of bad faith within theirs, and to show that the proofs of each one are not so conclusive to all eyes that those who do not see them with the same clarity as we do must be treated as guilty people.53

Thus, “it is necessary to go back to principles that are general and common to all men.”54 To discover those, one must follow the Delphic exhort ation that Rousseau began the Second Discourse with, and seek natural


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man directly.55 His own quest for natural man in that work paves the way for that search, by offering anew the possibility of a discovery very different than either fallen man or the man roaming Hobbes’s state of nature. L e g i s l at i ng f or m a n k i n d At the start of his Social Contract, Rousseau denied being a prince or legis lator and, a few lines later, famously proclaimed: Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One believes himself the others’ master, and yet is more a slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I believe I can solve this question.56

Neither of these statements is entirely true. Rousseau did not know exactly how the gradual enslavement of man had come about, but he did hazard a rather lengthy conjecture in the Second Discourse.57 And, while he was indeed not a legislator of the sort who drafts petty rules for the day-to-day administration of a state, the author of the Second Discourse was a lawgiver of the kind described in the Social Contract.58 Therein, Rousseau explains that the lawgiver he has in mind is to the great prince as the “mechanic who invents the machine” is to “the workman who assembles and operates it.”59 Rarer than a great ruler, this extraordinary individual would be a superior intelligence who saw all of man’s passions and experienced none of them, who had no relation to our nature yet knew it thoroughly, whose happiness was independent of us and who was nevertheless willing to care for ours; finally, one who, preparing his distant glory in the progress of times, could work in one century and enjoy the reward in another.60

In short, “[i]t would require gods to give men laws,” because the lot of the legislator is to have “an undertaking beyond human force, and to execute it an authority that is nil.”61 The lawgiver must remake man, and that task involves the radical transformation of solitary, independent individuals into parts which cannot exist without the whole that gives them their very life, both physical and moral: to bring it about, the lawgiver has to deprive man of his natural forces and replace them with artificial ones, “which are foreign to him and of which he cannot make use without the help of others.”62 This is the lawgiver of Machiavelli, and the author of the Second Discourse fits this description in ways beyond the obvious.63 Writing from Chambéry, he dedicated the work to the Genevans as the labor of a “man who envisions no greater happiness for himself than that of seeing all of

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[them] happy.”64 When, later on, he described how he conceived of the Discourse, he explained that he withdrew to Saint-Germain, where three women took care of him, rendering him as free of need as his solitary savage, and thereby allowing him to spend a week meditating alone in the woods. There, he claimed, he was able to see the nature of man stripped of the “petty falsehoods” that disfigure it and obscure it from view. Rousseau describes the experience as follows: Exalted by these sublime contemplations, my soul raised itself close to the divinity, and from there seeing my fellows follow in the blind route of their prejudices, errors, misfortunes, crimes, I cried out to them in a feeble voice which they could not hear, “Madmen, who moan ceaselessly about nature, learn that all your ills come to you from yourselves.”65

From the vantage point of the divinity, and with its help, Rousseau re-created man in his original state and, using this new building material, instituted a people – a new humanity, liberated from sin – and thereby proposed a radically new theodicy.66 The political consequences of these emancipations were enormous. Hobbes broke new ground when he invited each one of his readers to judge the validity of his claims for himself. He was able, thereby, to offer not just a compelling vision of what life would be like for individual men without a “common power to keep them all in awe,” but also a persuasive series of arguments as to why, despite obvious physical and other differences, men are naturally equal.67 Though epistemologically revolutionary, however, Hobbes’s image of natural man and his condition came with political limitations. By depicting them as he did, Hobbes was forced to present the transition into civil society and the consequent subjection to a sovereign foreign from oneself as the lesser of two evils. He therefore urged, “patiently put up with some inconveniences in your private affairs (since human affairs can never be without some inconvenience) rather than disturb the peace of your country.”68 Rousseau recognized that, however effective this foundation may have been, the arbitrary despotism to which it gave rise was ultimately unpalatable.69 By insisting that, although he is everywhere in chains, man is born free from domination and sin, Rousseau was able to part ways with Hobbes, and make the notions of individual agency and responsibility not only plausible, but perhaps also appealing. This almost imperceptible difference allowed him, in turn, to distinguish between the sovereign and the government, and to pronounce every individual participant in the social contract a member of the sovereign.70 Thus, he was able to keep his promise, at the start of the Social Contract, to render man’s enslavement legitimate.71


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No t e s 1 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men,” in Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. by V. Gourevitch (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 197. 2 Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’ inégalité, OC, vol. iii, p. 129, n.1. 3 Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), p. 235. See also Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 349; J. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. by A. Goldhammer (University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 286. 4 Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 160. This challenge begins with Rousseau’s note on the notes, in which he advises some but not all his readers to refer to them after having read the Discourse once without them. 5 I refer here not only to the length of Rousseau’s treatment of the state of nature, which spans most of the Second Discourse, but also to the time that he claims to be covering in the part of his story that admits of temporal considerations (see, for example, Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, pp. 141, 143–4, 149–50, 157, part ii, section 10). 6 C. Kelly, “Rousseau’s ‘peut-être’: Reflections on the Status of the State of Nature,” Modern Intellectual History, 3 (2006), pp. 76, 78–9. See also Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction, p. 289. 7 R. Wokler, “Rousseau’s Reading of the Book of Genesis and the Theology of Commercial Society,” Modern Intellectual History, 3 (2006), pp. 86–7. 8 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. R. D. Masters and C. Kelly, 12 vols. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), vol. v, p. 326. On Rousseau’s insistence regarding the coherence of his “system,” see, for example, “Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, pp. 212–13; “Letter to Beaumont,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, pp. 22, 26, 46, 48–9; “Preface to a Second Letter to Bordes,” in Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 184; Rousseau Discourses and Other Writings, p. 63. 9 V. Gourevitch, “Rousseau’s Pure State of Nature,” Interpretation, 16 (1988), p. 24. 10 Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 132. 11 Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 125. 12 Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 128, emphasis added. See also pp. 125–6. The ratio of state of nature to civil society in the Second Discourse is roughly the reverse of what it is in the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and other state-of-nature theorists. 13 Kelly, “Rousseau’s ‘peut-être’,” p. 79. 14 “Non in depravatis, sed in his quæ bene secundum naturam se habent, considerandum est quid sit naturale,” (Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 111); compare Aristotle, Politica, ed. by W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 1254a 36–7. 15 See Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 111. According to Gourevitch, “[t]he reference to ‘Bk. 2’ on the title page appears to have been

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a typographical error, and was corrected in the 1782 edition.” Discourses and Other Writings, p. 351. The erroneous citation reappears in the Rey 1762 edition of the Discourse, in Rey’s 1776 edition of several of Rousseau’s political works, as well as in the English translation of 1761. 16 Aristotle, Politica, 1260b 31–2. 17 Aristotle, Politica, 1288b 21–4. 18 T. Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. by R. Tuck and M. Silverthorne (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 11. 19 Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. by V. Gourevitch (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 146. Hobbes’s own countrymen had bestowed numerous colorful titles upon him, such as “the Monster of Malmesbury,” “the Devil’s Secretary,” “an Agent of Hell,” “Nature’s pest, unhappy England ’s Shame.” J. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 1. Parkin argues that Hobbes had become the bête noire of his age in the English imagination, and that the success of his critics in blackening his “reputation was such that their view of the philosopher as a misanthropic atheist profoundly influenced subsequent readers and still informs popular understandings of Hobbes’s ideas today” (Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, p. 1). See also R. Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, 2nd edn. (Paris: Vrin, 1995), pp. 100–5. 20 T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by E. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), pp. 38–46; see also Hobbes, On the Citizen, pp. 25–6. On Hobbes’s influence on Rousseau, see I. D. Evrigenis, Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 134–8. 21 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 39. 22 Derathé, for example, who is sensitive to Rousseau’s approval of some of Hobbes’s principles and aware of Rousseau’s admiration for Hobbes’s intellect, nevertheless proclaims Rousseau “indisputably Hobbes’s adversary.” La Science politique, p. 105. 23 Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, pp. 132, 135–6, 145–6, 151–2. 24 Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 132. 25 Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 152. Emphasis in the original. 26 Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 218. See also Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. by A. Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 67; Rousseau, “The State of War,” in Social Contract and Other Writings, pp. 163–6. 27 Derathé, La Science politique, pp. 138–41; Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 484 n.17. 28 Kelly notes rightly that “[w]hile a demonstration that the pure state of nature did not exist would not affect Rousseau’s case, a demonstration that it could not exist would” (“Rousseau’s ‘peut-être’,” p. 80). In this regard, see also Kelly’s insightful discussion of Rousseau’s example of the statue of Glaucus (pp. 80–2). 29 Romans 5:12.


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30 See J. Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th centuries, trans. by E. Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 245–7; C. Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), pp. 397–412. 31 Delumeau, Sin and Fear, p. 246. 32 Quoted in H. Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the ‘First Discourse’ to the ‘Social Contract,’ 1749–1762 (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 14. 33 Rosenblatt argues that Rousseau’s formation took place in an environment in which Original Sin and predestination had begun to be systematically underemphasized by Calvinist theologians as morally counterproductive (Rousseau and Geneva, pp. 12–17, esp. p. 16 n.30). 34 Music being the other, one that Rousseau ties to the themes of the Second Discourse in the Essay on the Origin of Languages. Wokler cites R. A. Leigh, who in restoring one of the passages regarding religion noted, “[t]his is precisely one of the great lacunas of the published text.” “Rousseau’s Reading,” p. 90. 35 Wokler, “Rousseau’s Reading,” p. 90. 36 See M. W. Cranston, The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 48; Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 358. Compare Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, pp. 47–9. 37 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 507. 38 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, pp. 19–21. 39 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” pp. 23–4. 40 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” p. 22. See also p. 26. 41 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” p. 28. 42 Rousseau, “Beaumont, Pastoral Letter of the Archbishop of Paris,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 4. Emphasis in the original. Beaumont accuses Rousseau of having set up “as a principle an Assertion denied, not only by Religion, but also by the experience of all Peoples and of all ages,” in asserting as “an incontestable maxim that the first movements of nature are always right,” and that “[t]here is no original perversity in the human heart,” claims that clearly contradict “the doctrine of the Holy Scriptures and of the Church touching the revolution that has happened in our nature.” Rousseau’s response is that a negative education follows from Beaumont’s position just as much as it does from his own. “Letter to Beaumont,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 35. 43 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 47; see also pp. 46–52. 44 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” pp. 49–50, 67, 73–4. 45 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” pp. 47–8. 46 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” pp. 46–52, 69. On those who do, see pp. 52, 79. 47 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” p. 29. Furthermore, Rousseau begins his description of his own work with a summary of the Second Discourse (pp. 28–9).

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48 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” p. 29. 49 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” pp. 29–31, esp. Rousseau’s second note, on p. 31. 50 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” pp. 39–40. 51 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” p. 40. This passage confirms Kelly’s interpretation of Rousseau’s “perhaps” in the Second Discourse (“Rousseau’s ‘peutêtre’,” pp. 81–2; see also Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 125). Compare Gourevitch, “Rousseau’s Pure State of Nature,” p. 59. Rousseau’s explanation to Beaumont on this matter also sheds light onto the relationship of Part i to the Notes: each addresses a part of the audience that can only be persuaded by the kind of evidence that it includes, and Rousseau makes certain, by means of the structure of the work, as well as his Notice on the Notes, that these readers do not stray from their path. 52 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” p. 54. 53 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” p. 75. 54 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” p. 55, a general principle which is to be employed also within the state (Rousseau, Social Contract and Other Writings, p. 60). Rousseau then proceeds to extend Hobbes’s search for common ground among Christians (Leviathan, p. 402) to all the major religions, arguing that their fundamental principles allow them to coexist peacefully, so long as they do not seek to convert others to their particular beliefs (“Letter to Beaumont,” pp. 59–60). 55 See Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 122. Compare Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 4. 56 Rousseau, Social Contract and Other Writings, p. 351. 57 See, for example, Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, pp. 125, 133. 58 See Wokler, “Rousseau’s Reading,” p. 86. 59 Rousseau, Social Contract and Other Writings, p. 69. See also p. 145. 60 Rousseau, Social Contract and Other Writings, pp. 68–9. 61 Rousseau, Social Contract and Other Writings, pp. 68–70. 62 Rousseau, Social Contract and Other Writings, p. 69. 63 See, for example, N. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. by H. C. Mansfield and N. Tarcov (University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 34–5. 64 Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, p. 123. Rousseau insists that this distance is essential. In Emile, he speaks of circumstances in which a man “can be more useful to his fellow citizens outside of his fatherland than if he were living in its bosom.” Emile or On Education, p. 474. In the Confessions, he explains that by this he meant that “unless one is a man of intrigues, if one wants to dedicate books to the true good of the fatherland, one must not compose them in its bosom.” Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 341. See also Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction, p. 287. 65 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 326. 66 See E. Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. and trans. P. Gay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), pp. 74–5; Wokler, “Rousseau’s Reading,” p. 91. Rousseau’s work as creator is, of course, not limited to his


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refashioning of man in the Second Discourse, but extends to other works, most notably Julie and Emile. Compare Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 332. Rousseau gives yet another signal in this direction at the outset of the Second Discourse, when he likens the progression of man to the statue of Glaucus (Discourses and Other Writings, p. 124). Commentators usually debate the nature of the alterations that caused the statue to resemble more a monster than a God, ignoring the obvious fact that the object in question is the image of a God crafted by a man, before it becomes a monstrosity. From the point of view of theology, God made man in His image, but from the point of view of the legislator, man made God in his. See Rousseau, Social Contract and Other Writings, pp. 71–2. 67 See, for example, Hobbes, On the Citizen, pp. 25–6; Leviathan, pp. 38–9. 68 Hobbes, On the Citizen, pp. 13–14. Hobbes adds, “[m]y hope is that you will think it better to enjoy your present state (though it may not be the best) rather than go to war, and after you have been killed or died of old age, leave other men in other times to have a better life.” 69 See, especially, Rousseau, Letter to Mirabeau, 26 July 1767 (Social Contract and Other Writings, pp. 268–71); see also Rousseau, Discourses and Other Writings, pp. 185–6. 70 See Rousseau, Social Contract and Other Writings, pp. 49–53; Hobbes, On the Citizen, pp. 73–4. 71 Rousseau, Social Contract and Other Writings, p. 41.

Ch apter 2

Making history natural in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Natasha Lee

As much as the Enlightenment has come to embody an age of rationalization and the rise of scientific thought for us today, an attentive reading of eighteenth-century texts signals their profound ambivalence toward emerging discourses of natural knowledge and the claims they made to know humans through physical qualities. The Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes voices such concerns: Curiosities of nature are a fertile source for deceit; it converts singular phenomena into miracles. One country’s natural history becomes supernatural in another. Facts, like plants, are altered when taken from their source: truths are transformed into errors.1

Having fought to get away from a culture of wonders and marvels, Enlightenment thinkers sought to circumscribe a knowledge of the mater ial world, but also articulated their unease toward the absoluteness of such expositions. Before Rousseau voiced his own ambivalence about empirical evidence in his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’ inégalité (the Second Discourse), he began his study of the human by discarding his contemporaries’ argument that social issues could be understood through the lens of a natural law arrived at through an a priori method. The Second Discourse takes issue with Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, and John Locke, among others, for constructing a skewed notion of the state of nature and claiming that it can explain the present. In his reassessment of the link between the state of nature and current social phenomena, Rousseau looked instead to conjectural history and to discourses of nat ural knowledge, including natural history, travel accounts, and inquiries into empirical particulars.2 In doing so, he produced a revised notion of the state of nature and its limits as a means of explaining society. Previous readings of the Second Discourse have focused on the manner in which Rousseau dissociates contemporary social questions from 24

Making history natural

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an unknowable state of nature, and have interrogated the implications of founding a material analysis on speculations, that is, of founding history on fiction.3 The following reading, in contrast, examines Rousseau’s ambivalence toward circumscribing the state of nature and toward nat ural knowledge on human beings. We will ask: Upon which foundations did Rousseau’s contemporaries construct previous notions of natural right? Which discourses – from natural law to emerging inquiries on the human – can one invoke to arrive at knowledge of the human in the state of nature? And can such knowledge be brought to bear on contemporary social questions? I will argue that Rousseau, by drawing on empirical inquiries and firsthand accounts to outline a conjectural account of the state of nature, participates in a scientific and fictional conjoining of facts and speculation that draws the reader’s attention to the precariousness of such knowledge. Ultimately, I will examine how more recent interpretations of Rousseau in the social sciences have produced the same finality of meaning in physicality that Rousseau opened up to historical readings of social contexts and relations of power. Rous s e au ’s c r i t iqu e of n at u r a l l aw The Second Discourse initiated its critique of existing natural law theories by historicizing the Academy of Dijon’s question: “What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural Law?” In posing this question, the Academy’s 1753 concours maintained the natural law connection between given essences and social order as still determining present-day society.4 In contrast, from its very subtitle, Rousseau’s Second Discourse instigated a crisis in the notion that a timeless natural law could determine social questions. By announcing itself as a Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men, the text removed any mention of natural law and whether it might legitimate the status quo. The Discourse thus cuts off the present from the past and, consequently, the origin of inequality from the state of nature. As Rousseau reformulates the question, two distinct moments clearly emerge: first, the unknown state of nature, which has perhaps never existed, and must nevertheless be envisioned through the speculative (even fictional) work of conjectural history; and, second, the civic state we do know, where social and historical man can be examined.5 From the start, two forms of inequality – one natural, one social – become apparent, each of which corresponds to a distinct state. Broken down into two parts, the seamless

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link of past and present embodied by the Academy’s question can be problematized. Having briefly taken to task natural law theorists – from Roman jurists onwards – in the Preface, it is with his contemporaries that the Second Discourse, with its concern for genetic analysis, engages in a more sustained debate. Once the state of nature is deemed unverifiable, writers who claim to circumscribe it, and who assume there exists a continuous link from nature to culture – from a point of origin to a knowable present – open themselves up to criticism. Against them, Rousseau initiated a practice of reading historically in order to draw readers’ attention to the temporal strategies of contemporary philosophers and, specifically, to the ways in which they deploy temporal inversions for rhetorical purposes: Knowing Nature so little, and agreeing so poorly upon the meaning of the word Law, it would be very difficult to agree on a good definition of natural Law. Thus all those that are found in Books, besides not being uniform, have in addition the fault of being drawn from several kinds of Knowledge which men do not naturally have, and from advantages of which men can only conceive the idea after having left the State of Nature. One begins by seeking the rules on which, for the common utility, it would be appropriate that men agree among themselves; and then one gives the name natural Law to the collection of these rules, without other proof than the good which one judges would result from their universal application.6

Since the state of nature is unknown, and since law itself is a social convention upon which humans hardly agree, competing definitions of natural law are bound to emerge according to Rousseau. Hobbes and Locke, most notably, derived an account of natural law by projecting the present onto the past, and then proceeded to map these presumably originary rules back onto today’s society. With the benefit of hindsight, defenders of natural law state that they can see the original traits that determine social beings, but Rousseau points out that the faculty neces sary to come to this realization, reason, is not within “natural man’s” reach.7 Rousseau shows how, through the articulation of beginnings and ends, certain Enlightenment philosophers wove together new narratives of the order of things, whereby they granted social conventions the status of timeless truths. Later, in the Social Contract, Rousseau reiterates this critique of contemporary conceptions of natural law, and the false authority of positive laws derived from a higher power. But the Social Contract at once condemns and relies on such inversions, leaving the Second Discourse as Rousseau’s most thorough interrogation of this rhetorical strategy.


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The faulty reasoning of natural-law philosophers rests on the rhetorical gesture of metalepsis.8 In his Traité des tropes of 1730, César Chesneau Dumarsais describes metalepsis as a form of metonymy in which a writer inverts cause and effect, or vice versa: Metalepsis is a kind of metonymy, through which one expresses what follows in order to convey what precedes; or what precedes in order to communicate what follows; it opens, so to say, the door, as Quintilian remarks, in order to pass from one idea to the next, ex alio in aliud viam praestat: It is the antecedent for the consequence, or the consequence for the antecedent, and it is always the play of accessory ideas in which one wakes the other.9

Metalepsis not only opens the door for the reader to pass from one idea to the next, as if ideas were rooms that one traversed in any given order, but also traces a trajectory that takes the reader down a different path, duping him or her into experiencing the chain of events in a given succession. The power of the rhetorical figure, whereby writers rearrange the sequence of events into a linear temporality that implies natural causality, is made apparent. In manipulating ends into means, and in retrospectively creating natural rules from a social perspective, Enlightenment philosophers were guilty of obfuscating antecedents that predated the “source” they claimed to have found. Under the cover of certainty of reason, the philosophical arguments’ a priori logic conveniently masked how particular interests were the prime mover of this newly construed, presumed causal, chain. The rules proclaimed “natural” are chosen in terms of their common usefulness, charges Rousseau: “This is surely a facile way to compose definitions and to explain the nature of things by almost arbitrary conveniences.”10 As timely agreements decree “timeless” laws, philosophers have made into causes things of which they wished the effects. Similarly, through sleight of hand, we are shown one thing, while told it is something else: All of them, finally, speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression, desires, and pride, carried over to the state of Nature ideas they had acquired in society: they spoke about savage man, and they described Civil man.11

Rousseau’s assessment of his contemporaries’ strategy as utilitarian and deliberate suggests that in resorting to rhetoric, natural-law theorists chose a language that intentionally distorted facts inflected by partisan ends, and benefited their own interests in the name of an unchanging, universal nature.

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N ata s h a L e e No t j us t a no t ion: a c or r e c t no t ion

Away from the subterfuge of metalepsis, it was still essential for Rousseau that we grasp accurate notions of the state of nature. In response to his contemporaries’ projections, and in search of a revised account of this state, Rousseau proffered a paradoxical appeal: we must “set aside all the facts,” whether understood as theological facts or more broadly, yet Rousseau himself buttressed suppositions with empirical data drawn from travel literature and his own observations of the natural world.12 It is precisely this impossible project – of portraying natural man in a state which cannot be known, and setting aside facts, while at the same time invoking empirical evidence – which Rousseau staged by way of the methodological exercise of conjectural history, supported by detailed footnotes. In the process, Rousseau’s text generates a series of questions about the uses of discourses on human physicality to found social analysis. The choice of conjectural history was itself that of a self-doubting epistemology which makes guarded claims, and Rousseau declared that his writings were in no way to be taken as “historical truths,” for they relied on mere conjectures.13 This genre was by no means an eighteenth-century invention: as far back as antiquity, we find a tradition of histories that long for lost Golden Ages or retrace the development of cultures in stages. This genre served to outline origins as well as to envision the future, thus giving rise to debates concerning the privileging of documented evidence over hypotheses and the role of reason in seeking out truth.14 By the late eighteenth century, Dugald Stewart coined the name “conjectural history” to describe David Hume’s, Adam Smith’s, and others’ recourse to probabilities in envisioning historical progress. In France, writers such as Etienne Bonnot de Condillac and Buffon also brought this generic development to fruition, with Rousseau’s Second Discourse now emblematic of the genre. Naturalists found, in this renewed form, an enunciative position from which to sketch a history of the natural world without making truth claims about systems. One could say that such histories even required a speculative text, as otherwise it would be impossible to obtain proof of physical phenomena and testimonies too far removed in time. Whereas emerging physical sciences became central to anthropology in the nineteenth century, early discourses on the human directly addressed the contingent dimensions of the knowledge they produced, and found in conjectural imprecision the freedom to investigate l’ homme moral and l’ homme physique and the link between them.15


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New inductive methodologies further underscored the tenuousness of the genre, as natural philosophers asserted the partiality of their research. In his Histoire naturelle, Buffon clearly sets the new sciences apart from mathematics and the deductive method which René Descartes championed in his Discourse on Method and in other texts: one can hardly expect exact demonstrations on this matter, for they only take place in mathematical sciences, and our knowledge in physics and natural history depend upon experience and are limited to induction.16

Only through repeated experiences and observations could naturalists eventually prove or disprove their hypotheses and, even then, not always in any definitive manner. This is not to suggest that natural history and other discourses on the human were what we would today characterize as “relativistic.” Enlightenment savants upheld the criteria of what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have named “truth to nature”: “the aspiration to reveal a reality accessible only with difficulty.”17 Indeed, in their use of conjectural history and inductive methodologies, naturalists conveyed the difficulty of achieving such aspirations. “La moins avancée de toutes les connaissances” 18 Beyond his use of conjectural history, and the partiality already inscribed in certain scientific discourses of the time, Rousseau further challenged the idea that we can understand social beings through empirical discourses on the body. From the first of numerous footnotes on natural history, Rousseau seemed to acknowledge the importance of new nat ural knowledge on the human, while simultaneously casting it aside. Echoing the Delphic oracle’s “know thyself,” and quickly commenting on the bleak state of affairs wherein human beings hardly know themselves at all, Rousseau’s first gesture of legitimation was to footnote Buffon. Rousseau begins: “From the outset I rely with confidence upon one of those authorities that are respectable for Philosophers because they come from a solid and sublime reason.” Yet the quotation he chooses is one in which Buffon admits that all that we know is that we know nothing about humans: “Whatever interest we may have to know ourselves, I am not sure whether we do not know better everything that is not ourselves.”19 Rousseau thus inscribes both the necessary dialogue with natural history and its self-avowed limitation directly in his text. Michel Foucault has suggested, in Les Mots et les choses, an enigmatic chiasmus: “for natural history to appear, it was not necessary for history to

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become more dense, nor more obscure …; what was necessary – quite to the contrary – was for History to become Natural.”20 This new discourse could appear only provided that historical thought be transformed. With this change, a certain conception of humankind materialized; one which emphasized the physical to the detriment of the historical. Whereas previous accounts of living beings included observations as well as fables, emergent discourses now focused on their physicality, as things to be classified, included in taxonomies, and, eventually – according to whether one agreed with Linnaeus or Buffon – named. Foucault writes: The classical age gives history a whole other meaning: that of positing for the first time a careful gaze on things in and of themselves, and then transcribing them into words that would be smooth, neutralized and faithful. It is understandable that through such a “purification,” the first form of history to appear was that of nature.21

By distancing himself from the material evidence of natural history, Rousseau invites us to question the “purifying” function of a discourse that founds its epistemology of the human being on empirical observation and correlates the social to the physical. The Discourse further distanced itself from contemporary scientific inquiries by rejecting particular methods and theories of the time. Rousseau refused to examine the human being in its embryonic stage, a reference that has been understood as relating either to Diderot’s transformationism in the Pensées sur l’ interprétation de la nature or to the preformationist theories of the time.22 Comparative anatomy, the field which the Encyclopédie had announced was burgeoning, was thought to be not advanced enough, and Aristotle’s speculative anatomy was similarly cast rapidly aside.23 Rousseau declared that he would instead consider man “as he is today,” a biped, thus rejecting all suggestions to the effect that we may have been physically different at one time. Rousseau also rejected a particular conception of sight, that of expert observation and empirical verifiability, which Daston and Galison have shown was becoming instrumental to making claims to truth: Sharp and sustained observation was a necessary prerequisite for discerning the true genera of plants and other organisms. The eyes of both the body and the mind converged to discover a reality otherwise hidden to each alone.24

Description, at the heart of the practice of natural history, was none other than the art of “donner à voir,” of making visible, as the Baron de Marmontel reminds us in the Encyclopédie.25 From Buffon to Charles Bonnet, the latter becoming one of the Discourse’s sharpest critics,


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naturalists defended their scrupulous method and the primacy of k nowing how to see, and they often asserted truths by pointing to others’ mistaken observations, as Bonnet warned: these diverse observations relied only upon misleading appearances, and I mention them here only in order to show how scrupulous one needs to be in examining facts of natural history.26

While enlightened naturalists asserted the veracity of their findings by warning against misleading appearances, the Second Discourse decried observation, privileging instead the “eyes of the soul,” as has often been remarked. Furthermore, to the seemingly arrogant expertise of the naturalist as keen observer, Rousseau opposed self-doubt, exposing both the object’s inaccessibility to observation and the potential inadequacy of the savant’s gaze. Voir is precisely what Rousseau’s Second Discourse relegated to the footnotes: Let my Readers not imagine, therefore, that I dare flatter myself with having seen what appears to me so difficult to see. I began some lines of reasoning, I ventured some conjectures, less in the hope of resolving the question than with the intention of clarifying it and reducing it to its genuine state.27

Rather, Rousseau urges us to leave aside scientific books and to base our knowledge of the state of nature, as well as our notions of natural right, upon the two principles of self-conservation and pity that Rousseau merely “believes he perceives.”28 Just as the careful gaze must be scrutinized for its potential short comings, Rousseau also calls our attention to the way in which words are neither “neutralized” nor necessarily “faithful.” Words are, according to Rousseau, the product of social conventions and in no way do they transparently convey the thing itself. This theme permeates Rousseau’s work, but is discussed explicitly in relation to natural history: The obstacle of all this Nomenclature could not easily be removed, for in order to organize beings under common and generic denominations, it was necessary to know their properties and differences. Observations and definitions were necessary – that is to say, much more Natural History and Metaphysics than the men of those times could have had. Besides, general ideas can come into the Mind only with the aid of words.29

Due to our inability to access things as they are, we are condemned to know them only through the social convention of language, a theme echoed by some of Rousseau’s contemporaries.30 In later texts, especially in his botanical works, Rousseau’s skepticism toward mediated empirical

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knowledge finds its more perfected form in the fantasy of a direct know ledge of the thing itself. Nowhere is this made more apparent than in his love of herbiers.31 While we are warned of natural history’s limitations and human bias in scientific endeavors, given the task at hand – outlining human beings in the state of nature – we can furthermore arrive at only approximations, since certain experiments are impossible to conduct. In one instance, buried in the famous footnote 10 on apes, Rousseau raises the question of whether humans are a different species from what he names “Orang outangs.”32 Despite the fact that the Second Discourse was one of the most advanced studies of primatology of its time, breaking with Tyson and Buffon not simply through placing human and ape under the same umbrella of animality – a feat achieved in Linnaeus’s taxonomy – but also through suggesting that human and ape were related, the conjecture remains just that. It is a hypothesis that can never be disproved since the experiment required to prove it, the mating of human and ape, cannot actually take place. Thus, the Preface’s question “What kind of experiments must be performed to know man?” proves to be rhetorical and moot in the real world. The above critique of metalepsis resonates here again: the historical order of things is neither arbitrary, nor without consequences. T h e us e s a n d m i s us e s of n at u r a l k now l e d g e Alongside his critique of contemporary discourses concerning human beings, and despite his appeal to “reject all facts,” Rousseau supports his “vague conjectures” through weighty arguments developed mostly in the footnotes, where he draws on specific examples from a variety of populations – the Caribs and the Hottentots, among others – along with individual case studies brought to light during the eighteenth century, such as the feral child, “le petit sauvage d’Hanovre.” This empirical data is often taken from unspecified sources, in many cases probably from the Abbé Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages, or from individual accounts such as Peter Kolbe’s Description du Cap de Bonne Espérance (published in English 1719, and in French in 1741), which were included in later edited volumes of the Histoire. At times, Rousseau invokes the name of a specific traveler or scientist – such as Condillac, Jacques Gautier d’Agoty, or, most often, Buffon – in order to further authorize and legitimate his claims.33 Rousseau’s paradoxical, simultaneous rejection of and reliance on facts has given rise to varied readings. In his Questions on Jean-Jacques


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Rousseau, Ernst Cassirer describes the Discourse’s ambivalent inclusion of facts as secondary to Rousseau’s categorical exclusion of them. Rousseau, Cassirer writes, remains untouched by the period’s turn to empirical data: He made it unmistakably clear right at the beginning of that essay that he neither could nor wanted to describe a historically demonstrable state of mankind … The true knowledge of man cannot be found in ethnography or ethnology.34

Cassirer argues that the Discourse instead advocates listening to nature’s voice, to an unmediated sense of our original state. If it is true that in his search for historical origins Rousseau stripped away all social traits from man to produce what Timothy O’Hagan has dubbed an “ideal type of the state of nature,” this Weberian terminology nevertheless reminds us of the insistent presence of phenomena in the Second Discourse.35 For other critics, Rousseau’s inclusion of concrete evidence within his portrait of the human is precisely what differentiates him from his predecessors. The Second Discourse thus displays the new sciences’ limitations while postulating an empirical identity that can only approximate humans in the state of nature, thus highlighting the distance that separates social beings from their animal state. At first glance, the initial footnotes (3–11) serve to describe humans in terms of physicality, proceeding from remote observations to nearby cases and, from there, to anatomy and universal statements about given species. Yet, each time, the notes end with the antithetical realization that social beings are at a complete remove from their natural state, and that empirical information is therefore irrelevant for the present. Robert Wokler has argued that in Rousseau’s predisciplinary commingling of anatomical and cultural analysis, he in fact produced a more exact science than either physical anthropology’s anthropomorphizing of distant species or cultural anthropology’s generalizations concerning humans.36 Rousseau’s comprehensive anthropology of humans accounts for man’s transition from physical to social being in three stages: from animal (which Wokler has shown to be some of the most advanced pages of primatology produced in that century), to Man, to monster. Yet, the depiction of human animality serves not to explain modern society but to assert that what differentiates us from other species is our perfectibility. Careful observation reveals that, as animals, humans were weak, solitary, fearful, and drawn to flight. What Rousseau perceived, though, was that, beyond the shared mechanical

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nature of animals, human beings were distinct in their freedom to act or not, based on necessity: I perceive precisely the same things in the human machine, with the difference that nature alone does everything in the operations of a beast, whereas man contributes to his operations by being a free agent. The former chooses or rejects by instinct and the latter by an act of freedom.37

Here, freedom – and a dangerous freedom, at that – enters at the level of the species: that which makes us human is our ability to choose whether or not to obey natural necessity, and perfectibility is a negative quality which, together with natural freedom, allows all social developments to ensue.38 Physical details are thus not called upon to outline any determinism or inevitable pull of nature over human beings.39 They can explain the inner workings of how ideas are formed, but they serve, above all, as a yardstick to measure our freedom from any presumed necessity. Once perfectibility is mentioned, the footnotes from 12 onward no longer seek to explain man solely in terms of his physicality; instead, social concerns of commerce and luxury are introduced, as well as issues clearly outside the bounds of nature, such as the constitution of the family. The elaborate use of documentation is counterbalanced by Rousseau’s caveats about the use of physical evidence to understand the human. The footnotes not only question the use of physical data to inform the social, but further point to particular cases that call for contingent social analysis. In her reading of the Discourse, Felicity Baker, building upon Wokler’s study, claims that Rousseau made an unprecedented appeal to empirical evidence and detailed documentation. Rather than seeing this as a commitment to a new science of a universal species, Baker makes explicit how Rousseau’s use of copious references to describe specific people’s mores, physical traits, as well as voices, made it impossible to render them abstract, into “figurative allusions to fictional thoughts of the kind European imagination liked to attribute to savages.”40 Baker reads the material tenor of the footnotes as a warranty against ventriloquizing newly encountered populations, as in the case of the Tupi tribe, whose words Rousseau quotes to conclude his text. Empiricism here serves to bring any references to “savage man” into an arena of concrete reference and specificity. The “example,” whether called upon to make a physical or a cultural point, resists any attempt at universalization or reification, and remains a witness to enduring inequalities across the globe. These populations are no longer simply abstract opposites to reflect us back upon


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ourselves; they display their political existence in relation to us and, in the case of the Tupi, set a revolutionary example for the future. The Second Discourse opens with a strange “Notice on the Notes,” which claims that the notes are but an afterthought: “these notes sometimes stray so far from the subject that they are no good to read with the text.”41 These unpalatable notes, Rousseau warns, should not be consumed alongside the critique offered by the narrative. Rather, they should be kept for a second reading, or for fun. Reading the notes might give food for thought, Rousseau seems to say, but they might also be a poisonous fruit best kept at bay. Rous s e au ’s prov i s ion a l au t hor i z at ion Rousseau’s inclusion of empirical data initiated a practice of anthropological study that relies on concrete references to the human body and evidence from the world at hand, instigating new fields of knowledge and prompting later readers of the Second Discourse to crown its author as the founder of several human sciences. For Emile Durkheim, Rousseau was, along with Montesquieu, one of the forerunners of sociology. A century later, Claude Lévi-Strauss dubbed Rousseau the founder of ethnology and of the “science of man.”42 Jacques Derrida has shown that the very social sciences that claim to have inherited from Rousseau often flatten the nuances he crafted in explaining the social in scientific terms. In his reading of Lévi-Strauss’s inheritance of Rousseau in De la grammatologie, Derrida pointed to the ways in which the anthropologist, in circumscribing distinct states of nature and of culture – and their correlative oppositions – at times blurred the very boundaries that Lévi-Strauss attempted to uphold. As his treatment of the incest taboo illustrates, Lévi-Strauss fashioned certain concepts from a contradictory union of something at once universal – belonging to the order of nature – and cultural, in that it is a law. He explains away this inconsistency as follows: the opposition between nature and culture, on which we have previously insisted, seems to us today to offer a mostly methodological value.43

Derrida makes apparent how Lévi-Strauss grants legitimacy to tools whose value are purely instrumental, reasserting a radical difference between nature and culture as the scientist’s right to use “methodological tools” whose logical value is merely anticipated, in view of the “object,” the “truth,” etc., of what science is trying to achieve.44

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Lévi-Strauss’s configuration of means in light of ends brings to mind Rousseau’s critique of metalepsis, and a brief return to that trope may clarify the implications of Lévi-Strauss’s own anthropological practices and what has been lost of Rousseau’s legacy. In his account of metalepsis, Dumarsais mentions only in passing the one trait that Quintilian originally considered central to the trope: namely, the way in which this rhetorical figure relies on an intermediary term – an often far-fetched image, as the trope’s nickname “farrafet” suggests – to produce the final effect. Thus, Quintilian notes, metalepsis is, “an intermediary step, as it were, to that which is metaphorically expressed, signifying nothing in itself, but affording a passage to something.”45 Quintilian’s definition of metalepsis highlights the instrumentalization of the intermediary term, which signifies nothing but serves to create a final effect. It could be said that the rhetorical strategy for which Rousseau reproached his contemporaries is at play in Lévi-Strauss’s texts, and made more explicit in another passage, in which he offers the following conception of the state of nature: one begins to understand that the distinction between the state of nature and the state of society … short of holding an acceptable historical meaning, presents a value that fully justifies its use, by modern sociology, as a methodological tool.46

In availing himself of an opposition between the natural and the cultural, while claiming that these concepts were purely instrumental, Lévi-Strauss upheld a language of empiricism and natural given without confronting the status of this newly created intermediary step. If the distinct realms of physis and culture were a mere step affording him passage to a knowledge of the human, then the tentative status of this intermediary could have been addressed, and the tenuousness of the knowledge thus produced could have been acknowledged. To this day, many human sciences remain influenced by Rousseau’s discussion of human origins, through which, however, some appear to have lost a measure of self-doubt and the critical distance he advocated when bringing the physical to bear on the social. In contrast, Rousseau appeals to a state of nature and a state of culture, and to a division between the two, further tempered by a reflection about the hypothetical status and the limitations of his own method. In his nuanced account of the state of nature, Rousseau grants himself a tentative structure of authority through what Derrida has termed “provisional authorization.”47 As such, the Second Discourse is not strictly fictional, nor does it make claims to a priori absolutes or to empirical truth; hypothetical and material are here articulated together.


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By restoring the concept of the “autorisation provisoire,” we arrive at a framework through which to reread Enlightenment texts on the human and to restitute their ambivalence about the rise of scientific thought in emerging human sciences. The concept also invites a continued awareness of contemporary social analyses that stake their claims on a presumed impartial knowledge of human beings’ nature. Provisional authorization is none other than the actuation of our freedom from necessity: as we take stock of the freedom we have acquired away from determinism, we gain an understanding of the contingent freedom afforded to us as social beings. No t e s 1 “Les curiosités de la nature sont une source féconde pour l’imposture; elle convertit des phénomènes singuliers en prodiges. L’histoire naturelle d’un pays devient surnaturelle dans un autre. Les faits comme les plantes s’altèrent en s’éloignant de leur source: les vérités se changent en erreurs.” Abbé Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, 6 vols. (The Hague: Gosse fils, 1776), vol. i, p. 75. Author’s translation. 2 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park point out that it is difficult to refer to a single term encompassing what would become “natural science” by the mid-nineteenth century, and propose instead the term “natural knowledge.” L. Daston and K. Park (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 2006). On the predisciplinary convergence of diverse studies of the human, see M. Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995); C. Fox, R. Porter, and R. Wokler (eds.), Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); on the rise, and historical diversity, of pursuits concerning human beings during the eighteenth century in France, see Emma Spary, “The ‘Nature’ of Enlightenment,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe ed. by W. Clarke, J. Golinski, and S. Schaffer (University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 272–306. 3 One could say that all studies of the Second Discourse address this question, but, for our purpose, notable discussions of the transition from the Discourse’s first to the second part include P. de Man’s Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 135–59. See also P. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poétique de l’ histoire (Paris: Galilée, 2002); and L. Althusser’s classic study, “Sur le Contrat social (les décalages),” in L’Impensé de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Cahiers pour l’analyse (Paris: Le Graphe, 1967), pp. 5–42. 4 J.-J. Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly, 12 vols. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), vol. iii, p. 17. Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’ inégalité, OC, vol. iii, p. 129.

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5 The fictional status of the Second Discourse’s hypothetical propositions is most ardently argued in Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading. 6 Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 14. “Connaissant si peu la nature et s’accordant si mal sur le sens du mot ‘loi,’ il serait bien difficile de convenir d’une bonne définition de la loi naturelle. Aussi toutes celles qu’on trouve dans les livres, outre le défaut de n’être point uniformes, ont-elles encore celui d’être tirées de plusieurs connaissances que les hommes n’ont point naturellement, et des avantages dont ils ne peuvent concevoir l’idée qu’après être sortis de l’état de nature. On commence par rechercher les règles dont, pour l’utilité commune, il serait à propos que les hommes convinssent entre eux; et puis on donne le nom de loi naturelle à la collection de ces règles sans autre preuve que le bien qui résulterait de leur pratique universelle.” Discours sur l’origine, p. 125. 7 For a discussion of Rousseau’s engagement with natural law philosophers, see V. Goldschmidt, Anthropologie et politique: les principes du système de Rousseau (Paris: Vrin, 1974), and Starobinski’s critical notes to the Pléiade edition, in particular, his reading of the retro-projection of natural law as “retrospective illusion” (OC, vol. iii, p. 1297). 8 In his Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man notes in passing the role of metalepsis in Rousseau’s Second Discourse but does not develop the notion. Though this figure has received further attention in narratology through the work of Genette, I refer to it as defined by the rhetorical tradition, and by de Man’s reading of the Second Discourse and the Social Contract. Geoffrey Bennington prefers the term après-coup to denote this causal inversion in Rousseau’s Social Contract. See G. Bennington, Sententiousness and the Novel: Laying Down the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 161. 9 “La métalepse est une espèce de métonymie, par laquelle on exprime ce qui suit pour faire entendre ce qui précède; ou ce qui précède pour faire entendre ce qui suit; elle ouvre, pour ainsi dire, la porte, dit Quintilien, afin que vous passiez d’une idée à l’autre, ex alio in aliud viam praestat; c’est l’antécédent pour le conséquent, ou le conséquent pour l’antécédent, & c’est toujours le jeu des idées accessoires dont l’une réveille l’autre.” Dumarsais, Traité des tropes pour servir d’ introduction à la rhétorique et à la logique (Leipzig: Chez La Veuve Gaspard Fritsch, 1757), p. 80. 10 Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” p. 14. “Voilà assurément une manière très commode de composer des définitions, et d’expliquer la nature des choses par des convenances presque arbitraires.” Discours sur l’origine, p. 125. 11 Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” p. 19. “Ils avaient transporté à l’état de nature des idées qu’ils avaient prises dans la société. Ils parlaient de l’homme sauvage, tout en peignant l’homme civil.” Discours sur l’origine, p. 132. 12 Although the “facts” in question have long been interpreted as referring to “theological facts,” of which the Scriptures attest the historical veracity, later studies have shown this sentence refers to more than religion. As Goldschmidt has argued, the precaution taken with regard to religion, as


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well as Rousseau’s defense of venturing only hypotheses, should be read as his broader engagement with the sciences of man, as “a pretext to suggest something else … demanding for the Discourse the certainty and scientific status that scientists grant physical inquiries.” Goldschmidt, Anthropologie et politique, pp. 132–3. On a broader reading of the notion of “facts” in Rousseau, see J. J. Rousseau, The Political Writings, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by C. E. Vaughan, 2 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), vol. i. 13 As Goldschmidt has argued, conjecture does not imply an absolutely hypothetical history, and conjectures could apply solely to how this and other events occurred, not that they occurred. Rousseau defends his conjectural method against Hobbes’s reproach that such a method can only lead to “connaissances” not “sciences.” In a five-part answer, Rousseau invokes the Comte de Buffon’s argument of “causes lentes,” namely the effect of repeated causes, as expounded at the end of Part i of the Second Discourse. Rousseau also argues that the story’s timeline can compensate for its lack of verisim ilitude, with the veracity of a story framed by two facts taken as real. Yet, whereas Goldschmidt concludes this segment by declaring that ethnological facts and a reliance on the biological serve to uphold Rousseau’s reasoning, I examine how the Second Discourse both introduces this empirical discourse into an analysis of the human and questions it. Goldschmidt, Anthropologie et politique, p. 268. 14 For a concise overview of the debates concerning conjectural history and the notion of conjectures, especially in its relation to juridical and rhet orical discourses in the early modern period, see E. Butterworth, “‘Readie Money’: Conjectural History in Montaigne’s ‘De la force de l’imagination’,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 42 (2006), pp. 355–68. 15 On the new sciences’ provisional character, see Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, p. 233; and, quoted on p. 451, Jacques Roger’s Buffon. On anthropology’s turn to the physical sciences, see R. Wokler, “Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment,” in Fox, Porter, and Wokler (eds.), Inventing Human Science, p. 32. See also, on the etymology of “anthropology,” C. Blanckaert, “L’Anthropologie en France: le mot et l’histoire,” Histoire de l’anthropologie: hommes, idées, moments, bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 3–4 (1989), pp. 13–44. 16 “Il ne faut pas espérer qu’on puisse donner des démonstrations exactes sur cette matière, elles n’ont lieu que dans les sciences mathématiques, et nos connaissances en physique et en histoire naturelle dépendent de l’expérience et se bornent à des inductions.” G. L. L. Buffon, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière: histoire et théorie de la Terre (Paris: L’Imprimerie royale, 1749), vol. i, p. 68. 17 L. Daston and P. Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 55–105. 18 Echoing Hume’s comment that “Human nature is the only science of man; and yet it has been hitherto the most neglected” (quoted in Fox, Porter, and Wokler (eds.), Inventing Human Science, p. 2), Rousseau begins his Preface

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with the following remark: “the most useful and least advanced of all human knowledge seems to me to be that of man.” “Second Discourse,” p. 12. “La plus utile et la moins avancée de toutes les connaissances humaines me parait être celle de l’homme.” Discours sur l’origine, p. 122. 19 Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” p. 68. “Dès mon premier pas je m’appuye avec confiance sur une de ces autorités respectables pour les Philosophes, parce qu’elles viennent d’une raison solide … [Rousseau proceeds to cite Buffon:] ‘quelque intérêt que nous ayons à nous connaître nous-mêmes, je ne sais pas si nous ne connaissons pas mieux tout ce qui n’est pas nous’.” Discours sur l’origine, p. 195. 20 “Pour que l’histoire naturelle apparaisse, il n’a pas fallu que l’histoire s’épaississe, et s’obscurcisse, … il a fallu – et c’est tout le contraire – que l’Histoire devienne Naturelle.” M. Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 140. 21 Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, p. 143. 22 In his notes to the Pléiade edition, Starobinski links this quote to Diderot. OC, vol. iii, p. 1305. For the references to preformationist theories, see Francis Moran, “Of Pongos and Men: ‘Orangs-Outang’ in Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on Inequality’,” Review of Politics, 57 (1995), 641–64; and P. Sloan, “The Gaze of Natural History,” in Fox, Porter, and Wokler (eds.), Inventing Human Science, p. 133. 23 Rousseau’s inheritance of Aristotle’s notion of nature is muddled. Despite a reference to Aristotle on the title page of the Second Discourse, it is from Politica, which Rousseau counters in the Social Contract. Furthermore, much of the early sciences of man’s enterprise is inscribed against Aristotelian finality, as is Rousseau’s notion of an originary nature. That said, Starobinski notes that a link could be made between Aristotle’s and Rousseau’s genetic analyses of human beings (OC, vol. iii, p. 1285). 24 Daston and Galison, Objectivity, pp. 58–9. 25 Jean-François, Baron de Marmontel, “Description,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, ed. by D. Diderot. and J. L. R. d’Alembert, 17 vols. (Paris: Briasson, 1751–1765). 26 “Ces diverses observations ne reposaient pourtant que sur des apparences trompeuses, et je n’en fais mention ici que pour montrer combien il faut être scrupuleux dans l’examen des faits d’histoire naturelle.” C. Bonnet, Considérations sur les corps organisés (Amsterdam: Rey, 1768), p. 170. On the notion of truth established through negative contrast, see Certeau’s argument that it is not so much by outlining truths that the historiographer states his legitimacy, but rather through identifying falsehood and errors. In a similar fashion, natural-law theorists such as Hobbes contrasted philosophy’s access to truth via reason with history’s lack of veracity, as it relied solely on experience (M. de Certeau, “L’Histoire, science et fiction,” Le Genre humain, 7–8 (1983), 19–39). 27 Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” p. 13. “Que mes lecteurs ne s’imaginent donc pas que j’ose me flatter d’avoir vu ce qui me parait si difficile à voir. J’ai


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commencé par quelques raisonnements; j’ai hasardé quelques conjectures, moins dans l’espoir de résoudre la question que dans l’intention de l’éclaircir et de la réduire à son véritable sens.” Discours sur l’origine, p. 123. 28 Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” p. 14; Discours sur l’origine, p. 125. This doubt is also expressed in relation to men in general: “comment l’ homme viendra-t-il à bout de se voir tel que l’a formé la nature?”, Discours sur l’origine, p. 122. And, in Emile, ou de l’ éducation: “En même temps que les observations deviennent plus difficiles, elles se font plus négligemment et plus mal; c’est une autre raison du peu de succès de nos recherches dans l’histoire naturelle du genre humain. L’instruction qu’on retire des voyages se rapporte à l’objet qui les fait entreprendre. Quand cet objet est un système de philosophie le voyageur ne voit jamais que ce qu’il veut voir.” OC, vol. iv, p. 831. 29 Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” p. 32. “Pour ranger les êtres sous des dénominations communes, et génériques, il en fallait connaître les propriétés et les différences; il fallait des observations, et des définitions, c’est-à-dire, de l’histoire naturelle et de la métaphysique, beaucoup plus que les hommes de ce temps-là n’en pouvaient avoir. D’ailleurs, les idées générales ne peuvent s’introduire dans l’esprit qu’à l’aide des mots.” Discours sur l’origine, p. 149. 30 The Encyclopédie article “Histoire naturelle” points out the dangers of denomination, most notably for the field of botany, where the vast number of objects covered can lead to confusion. The problem of denomination is at the heart of Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de botanique, as well as Buffon’s Preface to the Histoire naturelle, and is further echoed by Diderot in De l’ interprétation de la nature. 31 Foucault writes: “Les documents de cette histoire neuve ne sont pas d’autres mots … mais des espaces clairs ou les choses se juxtaposent: des herbiers, des collections, des jardins” (Les Mots et les choses, p. 143). On Rousseau’s botany as an ideal to be contrasted with other fields of inquiry, see P. Saint-Amand, “Rousseau contre la science: l’exemple de la botanique,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 219 (1983), pp. 159–67. 32 Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” p. 80 n.8; and Discours sur l’origine, p. 211 n.X. On this question, see R. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge University Press, 1976); on the question of the orangutan, see A. O. Lovejoy, “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on Inequality’,” Modern Philology, 21 (1923), pp. 165–86. 33 See J. Morel, “Recherches sur les sources du Discours de l’Inégalité,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5 (1909), pp. 119–98; see also the Pléiade edition’s detailed bibliographic references in OC, vol. iii. 34 E. Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. and ed. by P. Gay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), p. 50. Quoted in B. Roberts, “Rousseau, Stiegler, and the Aporia of Origin,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 42 (2006), p. 384. 35 T. O’Hagan, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 37. 36 R. Wokler, “Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau’s Anthropology Revisited,” Daedalus, 103 (1978), pp. 107–34. See, by the same author, on

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primatology: “The Ape Debates in Enlightenment Anthropology,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 192 (1980), pp. 1164–75. In the former, Wokler articulates his analysis of Rousseau’s thought in relation to two contemporary anthropologists who claim his inheritance, namely, Robert Ardrey in physical anthropology and Claude Lévi-Strauss in cultural anthropology. 37 Rousseau,“Second Discourse,” p. 25. “J’aperçois précisément les mêmes choses dans la machine humaine, avec cette différence que la nature seule fait tout dans les opérations de la bête, au lieu que l’homme concours aux siennes, en qualité d’agent libre. L’un choisit ou rejette par instinct, et l’autre par acte de liberté.” Discours sur l’origine, p. 141. 38 In “Perfectible Apes” (p. 125), Wokler remarks, “natural liberty and perfectibility … together enabled them to construct modes of life wholly uncharacteristic of the rest of the animal world.” 39 This term must be understood in the historical context of a shift away from an Aristotelian idea of nature as function to the determinism of someone like Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, who later defends the notion of nature guided by an élan vital, an inner-deterministic notion. 40 F. Baker, “Rousseau and the Colonies,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 22 (1998), p. 180. 41 Rousseau,“Second Discourse,” p. 16. “Ces notes s’écartent parfois assez du sujet pour n’être pas bonnes à lire avec le texte.” Discours sur l’origine, p. 128. 42 See C. Lévi-Strauss’s “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, fondateur des sciences de l’homme,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Neufchâtel: La Baconnière, 1962). Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of Rousseau has given rise to a series of readings involving everything from anthropology to literary criticism, including Jacques Derrida’s tracing of a metaphysical tradition and its binary polar izations, and also Paul de Man’s opposition between Rousseau’s rhetorically self-aware fiction and human sciences’ lack of awareness. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, and Suzanne Gearhart’s criticism of de Man, whom she describes as privileging literature over history, and thus neutralizing both Rousseau’s and, consequently, Derrida’s, historical language. S. Gearhart, The Open Boundaries of History and Fiction: A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1984). 43 C. Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962), p. 327; quoted in J. Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p. 152 n.3. 44 Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 153. 45 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, trans. by D. A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), vol. iii, 8.6.37–8. The example he gives is cano, canto, dico, where “to sing” becomes “to say” through the elliptic intermediary term of canto, “to repeat.” The common contemporary example for the trope is perhaps more explicit: a “lead foot” indicates driving fast, yet means nothing in itself. 46 C. Lévi-Strauss, Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1949), p. 1, quoted in Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 153.


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47 We can read Rousseau’s careful consideration of empirical and historical concerns back onto the Grammatology, often still taken as a straw man against which material and historical accounts of the social are elaborated. In claiming “to provisionally authorize himself” (“s’autoriser provisoirement”), Derrida in fact characterizes his entire endeavor neither as a rejection of the historical for the literary, nor as a mere reading of literary effects. Rather, a provisional reading merely begins with the realization that “tous les concepts proposés jusqu’ici pour penser l’articulation d’un discours et d’une totalité historique sont pris dans la clôture métaphysique que nous questionnons ici.” Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 148.

Ch apter 3

Rousseau’s Second Discourse: between Epicureanism and Stoicism Christopher Brooke

In my contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, I argued that we can usefully read Rousseau, especially in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (hereafter, the Second Discourse), as responding to and attempting to transcend the opposition between Stoic and Augustinian moral psychologies in the ways in which they had been articulated, especially by the Augustinians, in seventeenth-century France.1 In particular, I argued that Rousseau’s distinctive “splitting” of the notion of self-love into two parts, amour de soi-même and amour propre, could be viewed, on the one hand, as an attempt to recuperate the ancient Stoics’ concept of oikeiosis and to keep it in a foundational role for ethics while, on the other hand, enabling him to signal a great deal of agreement with the Augustinians about the iniquities of self-love. These iniquities, however, were placed firmly on the amour propre side of this new binary, in a place where they were insulated from amour de soi-même, and therefore unable to call this benign kind of self-love radically into question – as, for example, Blaise Pascal had done in the haunting fragment, “Thus we are born unjust, for each inclines towards himself.”2 I now think that my earlier analysis was incomplete, in some places muddled, and that there are three specific problems with the story I told there. First, while I concentrated on the Augustinian background, the Epicurean background is just as important, and we need to bring this into a sharper focus if we are to understand just what Rousseau might have been doing with Stoic patterns of argument in the Second Discourse. Second, I was working with an overly simple model of Rousseau’s distinction, falling into the elephant trap marked “Amour de soi: Good; Amour propre: Bad,” which is one that needs to be avoided in any analysis that does justice to the complexities of Rousseau’s thought. Third, I wasn’t thinking hard enough about the Stoics’ oikeiosis, which is sufficiently complicated that it can’t simply be shoehorned into an amour de soi-même-shaped shoe. My goal here, therefore, is to revisit these issues nine years after the publication of the Cambridge Companion, in order to 44

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give a more adequate account of the same subject than the one I offered there.3 We generally think of Rousseau as an anti-Epicurean thinker. In his own day, he was accused of plagiarizing Seneca, one of the most prominent and relentless critics of Epicureanism from antiquity, in the Discourse on the Arts and the Sciences; and Seneca also supplied the epigraph to Emile: “We are sick with evils that can be cured; and nature, having brought us forth sound, itself helps us if we wish to be improved.”4 If we think of Epicureanism as presenting versions of materialism, atomism, practical atheism, hedonism, and so on, these are not the kinds of things we associate with Rousseau. And if we line up the reasons why Rousseau came to reject the “Radical Enlightenment” of Diderot and the philosophes (to use Jonathan Israel’s characteristic terminology), a number of these seem to be bound up with what we might associate with popular understandings of Epicureanism. But, from his time down to our own, Rousseau has repeatedly been identified as being a kind of Epicurean. An early critic, Jean Castillon, for example, wrote in 1756 of the Second Discourse that It is almost a year since he [Rousseau] revived the Epicureans’ delusions concerning our origins; that he reduced our earliest ancestors to the ranks of the stupidest beasts; that he accused us of being the most wicked and ferocious of all animals.5

In the same year, Adam Smith published his anonymous “Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review,” which, if it did not identify Rousseau specifically as an Epicurean, argued that the reader of the Second Discourse “will observe, that the second volume of the Fable of the Bees has given occasion to the system of Mr. Rousseau,” thus aligning him with the most notorious “Epicurean” author of the eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville.6 This idea, that Rousseau organized central elements of the narrative he relates in the Second Discourse in accordance with Epicurean philosophy – specifically as it is presented from line 925 of Book v of the Roman poet Lucretius’ philosophical poem, De rerum natura – has recurred in more recent scholarship. Two of the more extended presentations of this theme come in Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas’s 1935 book, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, and in James H. Nichols, Jr.’s mildly Straussian book, Epicurean Political Philosophy (1976), and we can juxtapose snippets from these two books to get a clear view of what the major similar ities have been thought to be.7 In the pure state of nature, “primeval man

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was but a solitary, roving, stupid and unmoral beast;”8 he was “originally independent, self-sufficient, with desires limited to natural pleasures.”9 For both Lucretius and Rousseau, “the happiest state of mankind was not the earliest, but that of la société naissante, the intermediate between the primitive and the civilized … a state which was reached only after the development of language and the family and the discovery of a number of simple arts.”10 And scholars have noted that Rousseau and Lucretius present a strikingly similar account of what we might call the “psycho dynamics of the Fall” of natural humankind: man’s … strangely factitious desires, his tendency to crave things, not because they of themselves gave him pleasure or serve his real needs, but because under the corrupting influence of social suggestion, they seem to him necessary for the gratification of self-esteem.11 The development of living together with other men, the discovery of new things that seem to improve life, arts, and greater foresight – all these serve to destroy man’s former self-sufficiency and to present limitless new objects of desire. The crucial interrelated elements in all this, for both Rousseau and Lucretius, are vanity or pride, a concern for and a dependency on the opinions of other men, an ambitious desire for superiority over others in wealth, power, and esteem, and in consequence the unlimited desire for things that are not by nature good, but are merely goods in the (misguided) opinions of others.12

The most interesting bit of Lucretius for our purposes is lines 1131–45: proinde sine incassum defessi sanguine sudent, angustum per iter luctantes ambitionis, quandoquidem sapiunt alieno ex ore petuntque res ex auditis potius quam sensibus ipsis nec magis id nunc est neque erit mox quam fuit ante.

A typical translation into English is something like the following: Leave them then to be weary to no purpose, and to sweat blood in struggling along the narrow path of ambition; since their wisdom comes from the lips of others, and they pursue things on hearsay rather than from their own feelings. And this folly does not succeed at the present, and will not succeed in the future, any more than it has succeeded in the past.13

But Lovejoy and Boas have suggested that “sapiunt” might mean something significantly different here, so that the third and fourth lines should read: since for them things have savour only through the mouths of other men and they pursue objects only because of what they have heard others say, rather than from their own feelings.


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This is a more strikingly Rousseauian rendition.14 Rousseau and Lucretius agree on the artificial nature of political institutions, and, finally, they criticize actually existing politics in similar ways, arguing that “political society is the realm of false opinions, unnatural passions, and aggravated fears, all of which are incompatible with genuine happiness, with natural satisfaction, with unspoiled pleasure.”15 In summing up their overall case, Lovejoy and Boas observe: The themes which Rousseau sounds in unison with Lucretius are enriched and elaborated by him, and he has, of course, others foreign to the Roman poet; but, with respect to the issues pertinent to the controversy over primitivism, Lucretius may on the whole be said to stand nearer to Rousseau’s position than any other classical writer.16

This interest in Rousseau as Epicurean goes right up to the present. Richard Tuck, for example, began his Robert P. Benedict lectures at Boston University in 2000 with these words: “As Rousseau’s works became well known in the course of the 1750s, all over Europe they were immediately read as revivals of Hobbes, or – what was always tantamount to the same thing – of Epicurus.” I want to consider here neither Hobbes, nor the Hobbist reading of Rousseau, but rather to return to the connection, noted by Adam Smith, between Rousseau and Mandeville. This is a topic that resurfaces from time to time in the twentieth-century scholarship,17 and it is one that has reappeared forcefully in more recent writing on the history of political economy. In particular, some scholars are very interested in Jean Lafond’s idea that the late seventeenth century in France saw something of a merger between the traditions of Augustinian criticism and the neo-Epicureanism deriving from Pierre Gassendi, a process of confluence which included key contributions from La Rochefoucauld, Pierre Nicole, Nicolas Malebranche, and Pierre Bayle.18 In part, what helped to constitute the groundwork for this confluence was the shared criticism that both trad itions had made of the Stoic moral psychologies that were so popular in the seventeenth century. Pierre Force and John Robertson both lean heavily on this thesis in their recent books, Self-Interest before Adam Smith and The Case for the Enlightenment, respectively,19 and both of these authors are interested in, among other things, the way in which Rousseau’s Second Discourse works quite closely with Mandeville’s premises, ultimately in an attempt to subvert much of the argument of The Fable of the Bees. I do not have a quarrel with these writers’ examinations of the details of the Mandeville–Rousseau–Smith triangle, which seem to me to be sound.

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I am not, however, entirely persuaded that we should follow Force’s particular arguments for interpreting Rousseau and Smith as offering distinctively Stoic rebuttals to Mandeville’s Epicureanism. Force juxtaposes “Stoic” and “Epicurean” understandings of the role of self-interest in explaining human motivations to action. His interest is ultimately in the history of modern economics, and he plausibly identifies what Hume called the “selfish hypothesis” as Epicurean, further identifying Adam Smith as a critic of this hypothesis in its cruder manifestations. But because he is erroneously identifying Smith as a Stoic – an identification that is coming under severe scrutiny in contemporary scholarship20 – Force seems to end up lumping together the various writers who criticize the “selfish hypothesis” as being similarly Stoic, emphasizing an important distinction, used in the rest of the book, between two main traditions: an Epicurean/Augustinian tradition, which uses self-interest as its sole principle, and a neo-Stoic tradition, which uses self-interest as one among other principles.21

But this distinction, foundational to the architectonic of his overall argument, is troublesome. First, we might note that an Augustinian trad ition cannot confine itself to one principle, because if it denied grace as well as concupiscence, it would no longer be Augustinian; this is something that Force notes from time to time, but without quite acknowledging the violence it does to his analytical framework.22 Second, while the Stoics might have argued that rational agents were interested in others as well as themselves, this was not because they had “more than one principle” at work in their accounts of moral deliberation and motivation; instead, they had a rather complex account of one principle, oikeiosis (as we’ll see, in what follows) and they understood this principle, at its core, as a principle of self-interested behavior. Third, it is curious to line up Mandeville as an “Epicurean” and Rousseau as a “Stoic” in this schema, given that Force agrees that both writers deploy a notion of pity, which alone would appear to put them both on the “Stoic” side of the binary. As Force himself observes, Rousseau borrows Mandeville’s story of the rampant pig menacing the child, precisely in order to argue for the existence of a pity that is not reducible to self-interest.23 Fourth, it is surprising that Force should identify the psychology of pity as a key issue in separating “Stoics” from “Epicureans,” for the Stoics were savagely critical of pity. Their sharply rationalist ethics denied that pity was a virtue; indeed, they identified it as a distinctive vice, because pity made people unhappy when they reflected on things (such as the misery of others) that were not under


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their control. In contrast, for Rousseau, pity was a prerational impulse and, far from being a vice, was presented as the origin of all of the natural virtues.24 Finally, Nietzsche announced from time to time that he was “against Rousseau,” and the recent scholarship on Nietzsche notes that it is precisely when Nietzsche attacks Rousseau’s ethics of pity that he is drawing most heavily from Stoic moral philosophy.25 How, then, should we think about the role that Stoicism might be playing in the argument of the Second Discourse? In my earlier work I argued, in a similar manner to Force, that the Stoic concern with self-preservation, which they associated with oikeiosis, had its analogue in Rousseau in his treatment of amour de soi.26 Here, for example, is Cicero, in De finibus (the speaker is “Cato”): It is the view of those [the Stoics] whose system I adopt, that immediately upon birth … a living creature feels an attachment for itself and an impulse to preserve itself and to feel affection for its own constitution and for those things which tend to preserve that constitution …; while on the other hand it conceives an antipathy to destruction and to those things which appear to threaten destruction … [It] would be impossible that they should feel desire at all unless they possessed self-consciousness, and consequently felt affection for themselves. This leads to the conclusion that it is love of self which supplies the primary impulse to action.27

Passages like this persuaded me to identify oikeiosis with the outlines of Rousseau’s amour de soi. As Rousseau famously says, “Man’s first sentiment was that of his existence, his first care that of his preservation,”28 and the sentiment de l’existence was something the Stoic Chrysippus had called syneidesin, and which Cicero translated into Latin as the sensum sui. Just as the newborn infant’s desires are unreflective, so, too, Rousseau asserted that amour de soi was a principle “prior to reason.” So the parallels here run very close indeed. (We might note, furthermore, that the Stoic argument here is pointedly anti-Epicurean, for the instinct to preserve one’s own existence comes prior to any experience of pleasure or pain, denying the Epicurean insistence that we are fundamentally pain-avoiding creatures.)29 While the infant’s initial desires and drives might be unreflective or prerational, it would be a great mistake to neglect the role that reason plays in Stoic oikeiosis and its development. One well-known text reports that the Stoics “say that the appropriate is what when done allows a reasonable defense,” and one difference between human beings and other animals (and plants) is that the former become conscious that they are rational creatures.30 As reason develops, if we continue to live in accordance with

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nature, we will move from performing actions that have a reasonable defense (the infant in search of its mother’s milk) to developing an awareness that we can ourselves provide a reasonable defense of our actions, through to the Stoic goal of always being able to act because of the reasons we can give in the course of providing that reasonable defense. (And to do that consistently is to live a virtuous life.)31 This maturation of oikeiosis helps to explain why the Stoics’ principle of self-preservation can underpin two of their distinctive arguments which otherwise seem to cut against the foundations of self-preservation: their argument for the permissibility of suicide, and their argument for the cosmopolitanism of the Stoic sage. In the first case, one might (in certain circumstances) reasonably end one’s own animal life out of respect for one’s identity as a rational being. In the second case, the Stoics argue that oikeiosis is the basis of human sociability, and as we come to associate our own well-being as a rational agent with the well-being of those around us, first through the relations of parents and children, then through the relations with other family and friends, the circle of those we are concerned about continues to widen, until, ultimately, the Stoic sage is one who is impartially concerned with the well-being of the entire human community. Turning back to Rousseau’s account, it is clear that as we move beyond the more animalistic moment in oikeiosis, this suggested identification with amour de soi becomes less and less plausible. We are certainly no longer “prior to reason,” let alone working on a preconceptual level, and the Stoics’ ethics that rest on their account of oikeiosis are as rationalist as a naturalistic ethics could possibly be. In my view, the most intriguing connection between Rousseau and the Stoics obtains not in this erroneous equation of oikeiosis with amour de soi so much as it is a part of a broader analysis of what oikeiosis might have to do with Rousseau’s fully fleshed-out account of self-love, taking amour de soi-même and amour propre together. I want to suggest that there are a number of striking points of connection between Stoic oikeiosis and Rousseau’s amour propre. As with oikeiosis, there is a story about the development of amour propre as the human being matures. This is, for example, the central theme of the second half of Rousseau’s pedagogical novel Emile. Second, Rousseau links amour propre specifically to reason: it originates in reason, he tells us, and it is fortified by reflection.32 Third, both notions have a relative dimension, or concern the relations between the self and others. So, amour propre, as Rousseau presents it in Note xv to the Second Discourse, is “only a relative sentiment … which inclines every individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else,” and it is absent in the


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pure state of nature, because “it is not possible that a sentiment having its source in comparisons he [the human being in the state of nature] is not capable of making could spring up in his soul.”33 Oikeiosis in its developed form certainly incorporates concern for other agents, and it also involves an ability to draw the right kind of boundaries between the self and others: the Stoics thought that reciprocal respect for the interests of others, and specifically others’ property, was something that oikeiosis expanded to encompass, and that involved recognizing the distinction between what is mine and what yours.34 Rousseau’s narrative of the development of human society in the second part of the Second Discourse is one in which the development of amour propre and that of private property are intimately intertwined. That thought, however, reminds us of the most obvious difficulty standing in the way of this exploration of Rousseau’s amour propre in terms of Stoic oikeiosis, viz., that, as in this particular case, Rousseau generally writes in a highly critical fashion of amour propre and its effects. If we take the “amour de soi: Good; amour propre: Bad” view that so much of Rousseau’s rhetoric strongly suggests, and that so many commentators – including both myself and Allan Bloom35 – have reiterated, then we would have a severe problem arguing that the backbone of Rousseau’s moral psycho logy might be Stoic or quasi-Stoic in the manner I am suggesting. But there is an alternative account of Rousseau’s core argument – formulated by Nicholas Dent, adopted by Timothy O’Hagan, popularized by the late John Rawls, and both developed and deepened by Frederick Neuhouser – which addresses this difficulty by refusing to cast amour propre in an intrinsically negative light.36 In his indispensable Rousseau Dictionary, for example, Dent reports the familiar, relentlessly negative view of amour propre. And then he says that that account “describes what is characteristic of excessive or, as Rousseau puts it, ‘petulant’ amour propre, but does not describe what is intrinsic to it”: Amour propre, intrinsically, directs us to secure for ourselves recognition from others and a standing in society in which we are honoured as significant beings whose needs and desires have an absolute title to be taken into account on the same footing with anyone else’s. To have such standing is inherently valuable, as recognition of our human and moral dignity. To enjoy it is one of our proper goods; in fact, amour propre is simply the form that amour de soi (which directs us to the enjoyment of our proper good) takes when the personal good sought is one that we need in our dealings with others.37

There is no contradiction between “claiming such recognition as our due” and “denying the same due to others”; but the trouble is that, in

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the usual course of social development – the kind charted, for example, in the Second Discourse – we do perceive such a conflict, and this leads to our competitive striving with others, and so on. Our amour propre feels threatened, “and in its own defence seeks to deprive others.”38 Supporters of this view point to certain passages in Rousseau, especially in Emile, in which he insists that amour propre can be the origin of either benign or malign passions.39 They are interested, in particular, in the passages in Book iv of Emile in which Rousseau discusses the “extension” of amour propre to concern itself with the fundamental interests of others – exactly as happens with Stoic oikeiosis – but a passage that has caused sufficient problems to earlier Rousseau interpreters that, as Dent notes, they have explained that where Rousseau says amour propre, he must mean amour de soi.40 They point out, furthermore, that even if this view of Rousseau comes into conflict with some of the things he says about amour propre, especially in the Second Discourse, it also appears to be the way in which Immanuel Kant read Rousseau, connecting amour propre in the first instance not with Hobbes’s glory or vainglory, but with “a desire merely for equality.” John Rawls says in his Lectures, for example, that “It was not until I connected the Second Discourse with Kant’s remarks here that I felt I finally understood what either of them was saying. As so often, Kant is the best interpreter of Rousseau.”41 Obviously, this view is controversial. It cuts in particular against the sharp dichotomy between nature and society which much of Rousseau’s oeuvre suggests, and against the kind of view of Rousseau presented by Judith Shklar in her classic study Men and Citizens, which takes seriously Rousseau’s remark in Emile that “one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time.”42 For my present purposes, however, we can see fairly straightforwardly, given what has gone before, how we might map this more extended account of self-love onto the contours of Stoic oikeiosis. Oikeiosis takes us all the way from the first stirrings of animal activity through to a pretty fleshed-out account of the moral life; Rousseau’s story about self-love goes from the same animalistic starting point to the development of all the distinctively human capacities, including the romantic love of Emile and Sophie, and other benign civic sentiments that make life worthwhile, which we might then want to map in turn back onto the Stoics’ distinction between the passions, which are bad, because erroneous, and the sentiments, or eupatheiai, which are benign.43 For both Rousseau and the Stoics, human beings derive welfare from their participation in activities that suit the distinctive kinds of creatures they are. For human beings living in society – and there is no


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going back to Rousseau’s state of nature – the kind of creatures they are necessarily involves developed amour propre. Indeed, once human beings are in society, we can no longer distinguish between our purely “natural” and our “social” needs. As Neuhouser puts it, “This blurring of the distinction between physical and psychological needs is due to the fact that for beings in whom amour propre has begun to operate – and that includes all human beings – no aspect of one’s existence remains untouched by the concern for one’s standing among others.”44 Amour propre will take very different forms across very different societies, with the result that the life according to nature recommended by Rousseau and the Stoics will look different in different societies, too. Equally obviously, however, we mustn’t overdo the analogies between Rousseau and the Stoics. As Nietzsche once warned, “he who wants to mediate between two resolute thinkers shows that he is mediocre: he has no eye for what is unique; seeing things as similar and making things the same is the sign of weak eyes.”45 The details and the mechanisms at work in their explanations differ, from time to time quite substantially, and Rousseau had many harsh things to say about the Stoics in his various writings, including the marvellous remark in the Geneva Manuscript against “those supposed Cosmopolites who, justifying their love of the fatherland by means of their love of the human race, boast of loving every one in order to have the right to love no one.”46 And we should, I think, note that the interpretation I have presented here requires support from Emile as well as the Second Discourse. What is said about the distinction between amour de soi and amour propre in the Discourse does require filling in – Rousseau just doesn’t say enough there for us to see the detailed shape of the psychological argument – thus it might seem sensible to draw on Rousseau’s own filling in of that argument in Emile, even though it comes a few years later. But it might also be the case that Rousseau changed his mind in important ways between the composition of these two texts, moving from a more “Epicurean” stance in the Discourse to a more “Stoic” stance later on; so that we see in the earlier texts a fairly disparate mixture of Senecan and Lucretian elements, the contradictions of which are finally resolved in favor of an adventurously recast Senecan Stoicism by the time of Emile. That seems to me to be a hypothesis that requires more detailed investigation than I can provide here. Was Rousseau a Stoic or an Epicurean? Perhaps this is a silly, a misleading, or even a meaningless question; or perhaps it just doesn’t matter whether Rousseau’s theory was to some extent Stoic, Augustinian, Epicurean, Hobbist, or – as I called it in that Cambridge Companion

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chapter – a piece of “secular Augustinian Stoicism,” as if that radioactive cocktail could possibly be stabilized, and as if it is at all sensible to draw attention away from the various and important ways in which Rousseau was quite distinctively not secular, not Augustinian, and not Stoic.47 In manipulating these labels, it would be a shame if we came across as trying to suggest that Rousseau’s thought was substantially derivative from that of his predecessors; and if employing and deploying them has created confusion, perhaps it is best to abandon them altogether. In the Second Discourse, after all, Rousseau refers to the “ataraxia of the Stoic,”48 apparently confusing the Stoics’ apatheia with the Epicureans’ ataraxia, and we might choose to read this remark as his way of insisting that one can be Hellenistic in general without being overly sectarian about it. Perhaps we should view Rousseau (whether self-consciously or not) as an eclectic thinker – remembering that this was itself an important eighteenthcentury keyword – one who drew selectively on the various arguments that he found in older texts, juxtaposing them, and sometimes fusing them together as he went about creating his own, utterly distinctive system. There is certainly more Epicureanism than Stoicism in the argument of the Second Discourse; but it would, I think, be wrong in virtue of this fact to characterize Rousseau as a modern Epicurean. It is worth noting, for example, that while the Epicurean or Lucretian theme dominates the presentation of humanity in the pure state of nature and the subsequent narrative of corruption and decline, the Stoic motif comes to resonate most fully in an altogether different register, pointing beyond the corruption of actually existing human society to indicate a sketch of what a healthy human community might be like, a society of individ uals whose amour propre is developed but not enflamed; who are able to function as equals, respecting one another’s persons and property; and who live in accordance with their general will (a functional substitute here for the Stoics’ cosmic reason). To turn, at long last, to the concept of freedom with which this volume as a whole is concerned, we can consider the typology of freedoms that Rousseau sets out in the Social Contract, Book i, Chapter 8, distinguishing between natural, civil, and moral freedoms, and we might be struck by the way in which natural freedom refers to the more animalistic or Epicurean aspects of his presentation, while the altogether richer and more distinctively human notion of moral freedom as autonomy, or freedom under a certain kind of law, not only looks forward to the subsequent tradition of German idealism and its legacy in modern political thought, but also backwards,


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powerfully bringing out the extent of his deep indebtedness to the Stoic tradition and its ideals. No t e s 1 C. Brooke, “Rousseau’s Political Philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian Origins,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. by P. Riley (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 94–123. 2 B Pascal, Pensées, ed. by L. Brunschvicg (Paris: Hachette, 1976), p. 183. 3 Thanks are due in particular to A. O. Rorty, who gently pointed out to me years ago that I was getting things wrong in my reading of Rousseau’s “Stoicism,” to Mark Fisher for valuable written comments, to Peta Fowler for help with Lucretius, and to audiences in Bellagio, Oxford and Cambridge. 4 Joseph Gautier noted the similarities between Rousseau’s argument and Seneca’s Letter 88 in the October 1751 Mercure de France. See J.-J. Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly, 12 vols. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), vol. ii, p. 81; for a more extended treatment of a similar theme, see Dom J. Cajot, Les Plagiats de M. J. J. R. de Genève sur l’ éducation (The Hague: Durand, 1766). 5 J. Castillon, Discours sur l’origine de l’ inegalité parmi les hommes, pour servir de réponse au Discours que M. Rousseau, citoyen de Genève, a publié sur le même sujet (Amsterdam: Jolly, 1756), pp. vi–vii. This translation is the author’s. See also Castillon’s interesting remarks about Rousseau and Lucretius on p. 261, and especially p. 265. 6 Reprinted in A. Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. by W. P. D. Wightman, J. C. Bryce, and I. S. Ross (Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 250. 7 A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935), pp. 240–2; J H. Nichols, Jr., Epicurean Political Philosophy: The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 198–201. 8 Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism, p. 241. 9 Nichols, Epicurean Political Philosophy, p. 199. 10 Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism, p. 241. 11 Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism, p. 241. 12 Nichols, Epicurean Political Philosophy, p. 199. 13 T. Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things, trans. by W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin F. Smith, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 467. 14 Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism, pp. 232–3, esp. n.16. 15 Nichols, Epicurean Political Philosophy, p. 199. 16 Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism, p. 242. 17 See, for example, A. O. Lovejoy, “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on Inequality’,” Modern Philology, 21 (1923), p. 183; or M Jack, “One State of Nature: Mandeville and Rousseau,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (1978), pp. 119–24.

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18 See J. Lafond, L’Homme et son image: morales et littérature de Montaigne à Mandeville (Paris: Champion, 1996), pp. 345–68. 19 J. Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 392–3. P. Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge University Press, 2003). 20 Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, pp. 395–6; C. Berry, “Smith under Strain,” European Journal of Political Theory, 3 (2004), p. 458. 21 Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith, p. 5. 22 E.g., Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith, p. 25. 23 B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), vol. i, pp. 255–6; Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 36; Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith, pp. 14–19. 24 “In fact, what are generosity, Clemency, Humanity, if not Pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general?” Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 37. 25 See, for example, M. Ure, “The Irony of Pity: Nietzsche contra Schopenhauer and Rousseau,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 32 (2006), pp. 68–91; M. C. Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, ed. by R. Schacht (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). 26 Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith, pp. 63–4; Brooke, “Rousseau’s Political Philosophy,” pp. 112–13. 27 Cicero, De finibus, trans. by H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 3.16–17, pp. 233–5. 28 Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 43. 29 Cicero, De finibus, 3.17; also Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. by R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972) 7.85–6 vol. ii, pp. 192–5. 30 Diogenes, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 7.101, vol. ii, pp. 206–7. 31 Diogenes, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 7.107–9, vol. ii, pp. 212–15. 32 Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 37. 33 Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 91. 34 For the Stoics on the naturalness of private property rights, see A. A. Long, “Stoic Philosophers on Persons, Property-Ownership, and Community,” in From Epicurus to Epictetus: Studies in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006). 35 “The primary intention of [Emile’s] education is to prevent amour de soi from turning into amour propre.” Allan Bloom’s Introduction to Rousseau, Emile or On Education (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 10. 36 N. J. H. Dent, Rousseau: An Introduction to his Psychological, Social and Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); N. J. H. Dent, “Amour de soi,” “Amour propre,” and “Denaturing,” A Rousseau Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); N. J. H. Dent, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2005); T. O’Hagan,


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Rousseau; J. Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. by S. Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); F. Neuhouser, “Rousseau on the Relation between Reason and Self-Love [Amour-Propre]”, Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus, 1 (2003), pp. 221–39. 37 Dent, Rousseau Dictionary, p. 35. 38 Dent, Rousseau Dictionary, p. 35. 39 For example, Rousseau, Emile or On Education, pp. 215, 235, 243. 40 Dent, Rousseau: An Introduction, pp. 55, 143–5. 41 Rawls, History of Political Philosophy, p. 200. The remarks by Kant to which Rawls refers are from his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. by A. Wood and G. di Giovanni (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 51. 42 J. N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 39. 43 See A. O. Rorty, “Rousseau’s Therapeutic Experiments,” Philosophy, 66 (1991), pp. 413–34. 44 F. Neuhouser, “Freedom, Dependence and the General Will,” The Philosophical Review, 102 (1993), pp. 379–80. 45 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. by B. Williams, trans. by J. Nauckhoff (Cambridge University Press, 2001), section 228. 46 Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. iv, p. 81. 47 Brooke, “Rousseau’s Political Philosophy,” p. 116. 48 The Collected Writings edition renders Rousseau’s “l’ataraxie même du stoïcien” as “the perfect quietude of the Stoic” (Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 66).

Ch apter 4

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the late 1740s: satire, friendship, and freedom Marian Hobson

On the Origin of Inequality (1755), Rousseau’s second discourse, implies by its very title that inequality has a beginning. The argument of the discourse will refuse to naturalize inequality by putting it in an eternal present: it had an origin in time. Hence, physical inequality (some are stronger, taller, cleverer …) cannot explain, still less justify, political or economic subordination or even sociopolitical differentiation. These physical differences take on meaning only if society is already there in which they are meaningful and useful. The implications of this point were well understood in Rousseau’s time by some hostile contemporary commentators, who said that the Discourse was a denaturalization, and hence a putting in doubt, of the whole basis of social inequality, the “inégalité des conditions” (the inequality of conditions). In the narrative of the Second Discourse, social inequality develops out of dependence, and this is possible only if society preexists, if it has already begun. Some of the most eloquent pages of the Discourse describe the gradual development of society and the gradual installation of an all-encompassing network of relations and thus inter dependency. He who is dependent is not free: she is trapped in, or can only work with, a historically derived system of social and economic relations. The dependency woven by social relations entails obligations. Rousseau’s resistance to obligation, his supersensitivity to the semi conscious subtext that there is in everyday conversational interchange, his habit of overinterpreting – which develops into the paranoia legible, for instance, in the “Letter to M. de Saint-Germain” (1770)1 – these do not mean that Rousseau was entirely wrong about his friends and protectors. The extreme and fearful distrust of Diderot that letter reveals is in one sense the result of the very closeness of their friendship in the 1740s. The need to free themselves from this friendship was in a sense inevitable, for the two men knew a great deal about each other. We, however, do not; at least not for that period. This chapter first presents an example of the kind of evidence that can help to fill this 58

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the late 1740s

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gap, but then branches out to broach larger questions that need to be entertained, even if they may never be answered. Second, it aims to bring to the surface elements in Rousseau’s relationship with Diderot which are relevant to their views, and even to the development of their philosophical opinions on freedom, but which have not always been given the weight they deserve. F r i e n d s h i p a n d a b o ok The account of the breakdown of the friendship between Rousseau and Diderot usually given seems straightforward enough: two friends in 1757 have a noisy falling out, after tensions in their relationship.2 But there is a paucity of textual evidence regarding the beginning of the connection between the two men. They were close friends from the early 1740s – some have said, following the Confessions, from Rousseau’s arrival in Paris, in 1742. An extraordinary thing about this extraor dinary friendship is how many gaps there are in the biographies of the two at this time. Rousseau, having not had the success he hoped for with his method for musical notation, nor recognition for all the work he had put into the Rameau–Voltaire opera La Princesse de Navarre (1745),3 goes off the archival radar screen for about eighteen months in the later 1740s.4 Diderot, living from hand to mouth, is present to the governmental eye in spy reports and to the public in his literary work of translation and covert work as unorthodox pamphleteer, as much as for his editorship of the Encyclopédie, which stabilizes to some degree his financial and social position (certainly in 1746, possibly already in 1745).5 A small item of evidence about this period surfaced recently from the library of the great Italian theorist of economics Piero Sraffa.6 This is a book by the demographer and economist William Petty (1623–1687), Several Essays in Political Arithmetic, a reprint dated 1699. The theme itself as treated in Petty’s publications dates from at least 1683 (and the phrase “political arithmetic” appears considerably earlier in his private corres pondence). The book was reprinted many times. This particular copy was given to Diderot by Rousseau, and has a long dedication on the inside paper, the handwriting of which has been authenticated: The dedication translated into English reads: Rousseau assures Mr. Diderot of his tender regard and sends him this book, asked for three years ago, and whose dispatch from England was delayed by the war.7

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M a r i a n Hob s on

Front board and title page of SRAFFA 293. Reproduced by kind permission of the Masters and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge

The date of the gift is prior to 1757, given that the use of the word “ tendre” for their relations would have been impossible for Rousseau after this time. Thus, we can infer, the war spoken of is the War of Austrian Succession. A specialist in naval history, Professor Nicholas Rodger, has kindly been able to suggest a more precise date for the interruptions of supplies during the war, which is what, the dedication suggests, caused the delay. Assuming that Rousseau, or a bookseller acting on his behalf, ordered the book from England, cross-channel sea traffic is likely to have been rather difficult between 1744 and late 1748, the time of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, ratified on October 18 New Style. In the eighteenthcentury wars between England and France, communications were generally maintained during wartime via Amsterdam, even supposing packets from Dover to Calais were stopped, which, as a rule, they were not. But if the book were being routed via Holland, this poses problems as well, since France invaded the Dutch Republic in 1747.8 So the dedication was probably written sometime between 1747 and 1751, and most likely in 1749 or early 1750, after the Peace and before the first volume of the Encyclopédie


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went to press. One can wonder if the warmth of Rousseau’s dedication has something to do with Diderot’s imprisonment in Vincennes (he was freed after a humiliating confession, on November 3, 1749). Now some consequences, slightly surprising for the usual account of Rousseau. First, it would seem that he knew what was in the book: the natural explanation of the dedication is that Rousseau had either read or heard a close account of it. It has been said that Rousseau had “little” English, by which is probably meant that, like many Francophones, he could not understand spoken English. Second, Rousseau seems to have ordered the book for Diderot as a gift, or perhaps Diderot had asked for it, and Rousseau ordered the work for him, having previously spoken with him about it. These observations leave unanswered questions. First, how did Rousseau hear of the book? It seems doubtful that it was in the King’s Library, because Diderot could have borrowed from there.9 In 1749 and 1750, Rousseau had access to the Dupin de Francueil library at Chenonceaux, where he was working, so might he have seen it there?10 Dupin certainly had written a refutation of the parts of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws that dealt with commerce and finance.11 That Jean-Jacques had contacts he could ask to supply the book is the natural interpretation of the dedication. But how did he obtain it? Either from Parisian booksellers who imported books, or else directly from England or Holland, one presumes. When one consults Volume i of the Encyclopédie, one can see why Rousseau thought Diderot might be interested in the book. Reading the First Discourse illuminates for us Rousseau’s attitude toward Petty. And the gift suggests that he discussed “political arithmetic”12 with Diderot, then in the process of preparing Volume I of the Encyclopédie. P ol i t ic a l a r i t h m e t ic Rousseau’s “suggested reading” might have been purely friendly, just a piece of information to complete matters. But things here are in fact more divisive, indicating future dissension. For Rousseau’s own reference to Petty in the First Discourse is disparaging. Some have thought that Rousseau’s attitude toward “political arithmetic” – the type of demographic inquiry into government developed by Petty– derived solely from his contact with the work of the economist Jean-François Melon (1675– 1738). What is important is that it is in the context of what is an oblique reference to “political arithmetic,” that the issue of lack of freedom in its starkest form, slavery, is broached in the Discourse. Here, in 1749/1750,

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Rousseau refers first to those Moderns who speak of commerce rather than morals, then immediately thereafter to lack of liberty: Ancient Political thinkers talked incessantly about morals and virtue; those of our time talk only of business and money. One will tell you that in a given country a man is worth the price he would fetch in Algiers; another, following this calculation, will discover some countries where a man is worth nothing and others where he is worth less than nothing. They evaluate men like herds of cattle. According to them a man is worth no more to the State than the value of his domestic consumption. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedæmonians. Guess, then, which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was subjugated by a handful of peasants and which made Asia tremble.13

The calculation of human value by what a man consumes is certainly Petty’s method,14 and the example that Rousseau gives, the actual price of a slave in Algiers, is found not in Melon, as G. R. Havens claimed in 1940,15 but in the Petty volume that Rousseau gave to Diderot.16 The existence of the Sraffa volume described above proves that Rousseau’s know ledge of Petty was direct, not merely through Melon, nor from hearsay alone. The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences indicates Rousseau’s irritated reaction to Petty’s calculations. The Encyclopédie article “Arithmétique politique” (Political Arithmetic) of 1751 throws further light on this. It makes clear that that it has used the same edition as Sraffa’s copy, since its knowledge of Petty himself, or his other works, is minimal, indicating only that “l’ouvrage fut composé avant 1699” (the work was composed before 1699). This is the date of the Sraffa copy, although the essays had been published several times by that date, and Petty himself had died in 1687. “Political Arithmetic” claims that many ministers (with the proviso that “je n’ai garde de parler sans exception” [I am careful not to speak as if there were no exceptions]) are only too willing to avoid the arduous search for “des combinaisons et des suites d’opérations analytiques” (combinations and series of analyt ical operations), in other words, for a statistical basis for their decisions. I shall return briefly to that phrase, as it is important to any understanding of the differences between Diderot and Rousseau. Petty himself clearly pointed out that this is to treat man as a countable item,17 an operation whose paradoxical force – producing inequality while homogenizing for the purposes of fair comparison – is evident to the Rousseau of the Second Discourse.18 “Political Arithmetic” also says of yet others that several think themselves endowed with so great a natural genius that they are dispensed from such a slow procedure which requires much effort, and, as well, the nature of business affairs hardly ever allows or demands geometrical precision.19


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So part of the inwardness of the Encyclopédie article is a criticism of the lack of technical skill in French government circles. The summary of Petty in the article brings out the competitive axe being ground against France, by making it, if possible, even sharper than in the English. It compares what today would be called the Gross National Product (GNP, in this case, agricultural) of Holland and France, “les rentes des terres” (income from land). The summary twice reminds us that the figures date from 1699, and proceeds to give a series of figures which are not to France’s advantage: In the three realms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, there are about 20,000 ecclesiastics; and, in France, there are more than 270,000. The kingdom of England has more than 40,000 sailors, et cetera; and, in France, there are not more than 10,000.20

The article actually gives an account of Davenant’s criticisms of Petty’s calculations. But the message is pretty clear: “Political Arithmetic” con tains a possible basis for a comparative criticism of French economic policy, based on population and revenue figures. It should also be remembered that the article “Autorité politique” (Political Authority) in the same volume and in alphabetical proximity, created a storm upon publication.21 The final sentence of the first paragraph of “Political Arithmetic” cited above is particularly interesting in relation to Rousseau: However, if the nature of business required and permitted it, I do not doubt that one would be able to persuade oneself that the political world, just as well as the physical world, can in many respects be regulated by weight, number, and measure.22

This last phrase is a translation of a kind of slogan in Petty’s works: “weight and measure.” This may be Diderot’s hope, but can it be Rousseau’s, even at this early date? One wonders, especially given the paragraph in the First Discourse that mentions the price of the Algerian slave. We have seen that the statement in Rousseau’s dedication written on the copy of Petty speaks very precisely of “three years.” This suggests that in 1746 or 1747 Diderot and Rousseau were already discussing the use for public administration of statistics and demography. The question, then, becomes: is Diderot, in writing his article on political arithmetic, replying to Rousseau’s Discourse, with one eye on Petty? Or vice versa: is Rousseau in his Discourse replying to Diderot’s article? Diderot actually corrected the proofs of the Discourse (because Rousseau was ill), so he was, at some point anyway, thoroughly familiar with its content.

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Given that up to now we do not know whether Diderot’s article or Rousseau’s First Discourse was written first, we may never know. What matters, however, is that we have found a dialogue about statistics and their moral and ontological value, a dialogue of a particular sort, conducted through their own writings, through which they become rather than express what they already are. F r i e n d s h i p a n d s at i r e In Rousseau’s unpublished papers there is at least one hyperbolic statement of his admiration for Diderot, although the latter is not named in the fragment: and even more the conversations of this virtuous Philosopher whose friendship, immortalized already in his writings, makes the glory and the happiness of my life, of this astonishing, universal genius, perhaps unique, whose worth his c entury neglects but in whom the future will with difficulty see only a man.23

But, earlier than the article “Political Arithmetic” and the First Discourse, there seem to be cases of closeness in action, not just of statement. The strangest is perhaps the unfinished pilot number of a review journal, Le Persifleur (The Debunker), which takes the form of a spoof application for its own editorship.24 Even from our distance in time, this is pretty amusing stuff (modern journalists might read it with profit). It explains why the editors of the publication are not going to bother to read other journals, nor study the classics or the sciences either. And, at this point, Rousseau has scribbled: “Je vous prie de remplir cette lacune, mais de bonne foi et sans marchander” (I beg you to fill in this gap, but in good faith, and without any stipulations).25 This request, presumably for a spoof definition of “geometry,” seems to have been addressed to Diderot, as the whole piece has a sort of postscript asking someone, presumably Diderot, to correct it: “Je vous supplie, mon cher, de lire ceci en particulier, et de le corriger avant que d’en faire lecture à ces messieurs” (I beg you, my dear, to read this in private and to correct it before reading it to these gentlemen).26 Some have thought that “ces messieurs” were Condillac and perhaps d’Alembert, though, as yet, there is no evidence that anyone but Rousseau possessed a copy. If this satire of a first number of a journal was to be written by Rousseau and Diderot jointly, then the interjection, speaking of “bonne foi et sans marchander” (in good faith and without any stipulations), can


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only express something like a fear that Diderot will operate a kind of parody at a second degree, one that will hit out at Rousseau and thus play something like a practical joke behind his back. Indeed, about ten years later, Diderot does in fact perform a parody of himself, and thus of others, by so altering an introduction to his novel La Religieuse (The Nun) that until quite recently it passed as a text by Grimm.27 Le Persifleur has caused excitement and raised eyebrows because it says something that Diderot’s masterpiece Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew) cites without reference or acknowledgment: in the Persifleur self-portrait, Rousseau writes that “rien n’est si dissemblable à moi que moi-même” (nothing is less like me than myself). This is almost but not quite repeated in Diderot’s dialogue, in Moi’s introduction of his interlocutor. For these reasons, Rameau’s nephew has been identified by some with Rousseau. We may tend to forget that this marvelous work is a satire – it is labeled Satyre seconde. Could it be the case that Rousseau is the butt of the satire? Donal O’Gorman certainly thought so, and produced some interesting arguments to try to prove it.28 We need now to take into account several factors which work against that interpretation. First, Rameau’s nephew – the real one as described by his friends (by Jacques Cazotte, for instance) – is actually very similar to Diderot’s portrait. Second, it does not follow that, because a central characteristic of Rameau the nephew is as if pre-alluded to in the spoof journal, therefore, all of Rousseau is projected onto Rameau. Nonetheless, what eventually surfaces in Rousseau and Diderot’s quarrel is a tension that had probably been underlying their relation for a long time. It should remind us that both Rameau the uncle and Rousseau – by his attacks first on the composer, and then on the philosophes – figured largely in the cares and troubles that Diderot had to bear in the 1750s.29 (The Querelle des Bouffons (a quarrel about Italian opera), relayed by Rousseau’s compos ition and publication of the Letter on French Music, which increased the antagonism to the Encyclopédie among those of the French notables who were supporters of the French style of opera; the Encyclopédie actually suppressed in 1759.) Both Rousseau and Diderot had pronounced proclivities for satire, which were manifested by Rousseau later, in remarks, for instance, in the Letter to d’Alembert – which must have seemed amazingly cutting about Diderot to those who appreciated their inwardness – but also in remarks against the city dwellers of Paris, in Julie, or the New Héloïse. As for Diderot, according to his daughter, he worked to suppress his satirical tendencies, although he wrote more public – if not actually published – satires, for example, in The Salon of 1767.

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Le Persifleur, however much it is self-satire on Rousseau’s part, is also a satire, albeit a gentle one, of Diderot. In the intellectual biography that the spoof journal supplies, the speaker describes his relation to dictionaries (the subtitle of the Encyclopédie was Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (A Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Professions)): I have only applied myself to the reading of Dictionaries, and I have done it with such profit that in less than three months I find myself able to speak decisively about everything with as much assurance and authority as if I had studied for two years.30

The speaker-with-authority is here Diderot. But Rousseau also writes: I have moreover acquired a little collection of Latin passages taken from various poets, in which I will find stuff to embroider and prettify my pages, being economical with them so that they last a long time.31

This seems to be a remark by Rousseau about himself, because we know from the Confessions that he was learning this kind of passage by heart.32 They may actually have been practicing writing in each other’s style,33 an exercise that is quite close to parody (one might remember the derivation of that word – “along the path” is a possible translation). In that case, Diderot seems to have been the stronger influence at this point. Rousseau much later, in the Letter to Monsieur de Saint Germain of 1770, admits that he studied Diderot’s style. The admission is revealingly embedded in an accusation that Diderot, along with Grimm, may be fabricating “quelques écrits abominables qu’ils m’auront attribués” (some abominable writings that they will have attributed to me).34 That Diderot and Grimm were indeed involved in altering actual letters at about this date is correct, though it may have been as a form of private letting-off of steam about Rousseau’s public readings of the Confessions rather than anything more sinister, because they never proceeded to action, however much both sides used writing as an aggressive weapon – Rousseau in his correspondence, including the Letter to d’Alembert, and Diderot in his Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero. But what is interesting here is what is said about Rousseau’s own style, and why Diderot will have found it easy to imitate: As for style, a man who possesses to a superior degree the art of writing finds it easy to imitate the style of another, even when it is distinctive … this imitation of my style may be particularly easy to Mr. [Diderot], whose diction I studied carefully when I began to write, and who even put into my first works several bits that don’t stick out from the rest, and which one can’t pick out at least in regard to style.35


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Very similar passages occur in notes appended to one of the versions of this letter, and some of them were repeated in the Confessions: Add to this the continual pushings of Diderot, who either because he couldn’t forget the Vincennes dungeon, or because he had already formed the project of making me hated, was always exciting me and stimulating me to be sarcastic. As soon as I was in the countryside and this pushing had ceased, the character and the tone of my writings changed, and I went back to my own nature.36 As for the ideas which he had the kindness to lend me and which I was stupid enough to adopt, these are very easy to distinguish from mine, as can be seen in the idea of the Philosopher who is arguing himself into a position while pushing his bonnet down on his ears. (Disc. Sur l’inég). For this piece is his entirely. It is certain that Mr. Diderot always abused my confidence, and my easygoing nature, to give to my writings a harsh tone and a black air which they lost as soon as he stopped directing me.37

In this letter on the brink of paranoia, Rousseau admits imitating Diderot’s style, while maintaining that Diderot prompts him to write harsh and satirical pieces. Diderot could in fact do this, because he was influencing Rousseau’s style, and he himself had a facility for imitation. What is going on? If we do not just reject Rousseau’s account, it means that there is a kind of intellectual interdependence going as far as actual mimicry at this time (c. 1750), to which they react by occasional satire, and which for Rousseau is later experienced, retrospectively, as a loss of mental liberty. When, in 1749, Rousseau in tears visits Diderot in prison, Diderot turns to the almoner also present and comments, “Vous voyez, Monsieur, comment m’aiment mes amis” (You see, Sir, how my friends love me).38 This comment is tantamount to a satire worthy of his work The Paradox on the Actor, written some twenty years later, in which the actor watching the audience moved to tears laughs at them from behind the character he is playing, and is thus of a kind to justify the suspicion expressed by Rousseau at the end of Le Persifleur. Yet we know that Diderot was not only a cynical observer; he was himself easily moved to tears. Satire forms a self-protection here. Rousseau and Diderot are becoming aware of their intellectual differences: essentially, over belief in God and over man’s natural sociability. But, at this point, the differences are not stable; they are differences of emphasis and occasions for mockery. Rousseau, until the Second Discourse, seems to have oscillated between belief in God and a much more complex view of the origin of the world and of the nature of causality, one that came from his study of Buffon, and the discussions in the very first parts of the Natural History. This view was not obviously religious in any way.39 Rousseau and Diderot cannot accept each other’s

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arguments,40 yet they have in some sense developed them in common, by arguing against one another. This is what the gift of the Petty volume shows, I suggest. P ol i t ic a l e c onom y A question, not often asked by commentators, remains: Rousseau was given the musical articles to write for the Encyclopédie, reflecting what was his first public activity after his arrival in Paris. But why was he also asked to write the “Political Economy” entry, but only that one, among the many articles dealing with political philosophy? In other words, we know that, corresponding to his public profile at the time, he was asked to supply the articles on music in the mid-1740s, but we do not know why he was allotted the major article on political theory, for which he used part of the material in the Geneva Manuscript, an early version of the Social Contract (or possibly vice versa – the Genevan manuscript might be exploiting a part of the Encyclopédie article), nor when he was asked to supply it. It is the only article by Rousseau in the Encyclopédie besides those on music. Nothing in his publication record at that time hinted he would have anything interesting to say on such a major and politically difficult subject. Yet the gift of the Petty volume to Diderot suggests, at the very least, that Rousseau and Diderot participated in discussions on much wider subjects than music. Was “Political Economy,” published in November 1755, perhaps thought of as a kind of counterweight to “Political Arithmetic”? But a counterweight in whose mind? Jean-Jacques objects, say the Confessions, to Diderot’s dictatorial ways. But the worst sort of dictatorship is over what goes into his writings. Diderot, Rousseau tells us in the Confessions, picking up the “Letter to Monsieur de Saint Germain” of 1770, preferred the Second Discourse to all of Rousseau’s other works, and Diderot was most useful to him in his advice regarding that work. Some believe this, and indeed “restore” bits of the Second Discourse to Diderot. But what Rousseau is talking about here is less content than tone: [Diderot] abused my trust in order to give my writings that harsh tone and dark air which they no longer had when he ceased to direct me. The piece about the philosopher who reasons with himself while blocking his ears in order to harden himself to the moans of an unfortunate man is of his making, and he had provided me with others still stronger that I could not resolve to use. But attributing this dark mood to the one given to him by the Keep of Vincennes – a rather strong dose of which is also found in his Clairval – it never entered my mind to suspect the slightest wickedness [spite] in him.41


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What Rousseau has not been able to face, perhaps not even to understand, is the manner in which Diderot thinks by opposition, espousing a position and then undermining it – the conflation of the two heroes’ names in Diderot’s play Le Fils naturel (The Natural Son) is indicative in this regard. Earlier, the most striking examples in their lives occur when Diderot speaks against an amoralist position, a Hobbesian one, as he tends to think of it. He does this in the Pensées philosophiques (Philosophical Thoughts) and also in the Encyclopédie article “Droit naturel” (Natural Right). The latter article has sometimes been thought to be an attack on Rousseau’s article “Political Economy” published in the same volume of the Encyclopédie (vol. v, 1755); and the first version of the Social Contract (the Geneva Manuscript) to be a reply to this attack.42 This has been very well studied by Jean-Claude Bourdin,43 who shows how, in “Political Economy,” Rousseau borrows the concept of “general will” from Diderot’s article, but gradually alters it. The problem centers on the status of the volonté générale, which for Diderot is the volonté générale du genre humain, the general will of the whole human species. Rousseau will gradually strip out “genre humain” (human kind) as part of the concept of general will. What he is resistant to is that, in Diderot, this is an anthropological concept; for Rousseau human kind cannot be also a political concept – just like that. (If accepted, this conception may have some consequences for the notions of human and animal rights in our day, as well as in the eighteenth century.) Diderot’s “human kind” is an agglomeration of beings, and he makes of them an animal species without exhibiting a methodological consciousness of what is being done – there are in fact some amazingly modern remarks about “animal rights” in the article (in section vi). For Diderot, man has a “conformity” of physiology with other men which regulates everything else. The mechanist view of society in the article “Political Arithmetic,” one which uses “des combinaisons & des suites analytiques” (combinations and analytical series), is, in Diderot, the product of a materialist view of man, one that enables the assessment of his value as if he were an animal, an idea which the First Discourse has already criticized. Diderot’s “Natural Right” article, after his introduction, has, as numbered paragraph i, a very stark statement of the implications of a materialism which disallows free will: There will be neither reasoned goodness nor wickedness, although there may be animal goodness and wickedness; there will be neither moral good or evil, nor just nor unjust, nor obligation nor right.44

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Diderot then produces Hobbesian (or, perhaps, what later would be Sadeian) man, who allows any cruelty or injustice to be visited on himself, provided that he can do the same to others in exchange. Diderot argues with this “raisonneur violent” (violent reasoner) and treats him, in turn, violently (he threatens to smother him). But the basis of the dismissal of the “violent reasoner” is precisely reason. Diderot, deliberately no doubt, produces in the article phrases which pick up Rousseauian ones: Man is not only an animal, but a reasoning animal; so that as a result there are means of discovering the truth already in the question … all these consequences are evident for the man who reasons, and he who will not reason is renouncing his quality of human being and must be treated as a denatured being.45

In the same year, Rousseau published in the Second Discourse this famous phrase: I almost dare affirm that the state of reflection is a state contrary to Nature and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.46

The Second Discourse comes out in May 1755, and the fifth volume of the Encyclopédie in November, so the elements of a dialogue are present in the very vocabulary Diderot has chosen to employ. In the article “Natural Right,” the irreducible individuality of human kind means for Diderot that “il est absurde de faire vouloir à d’autres ce qu’on veut” (it is absurd to make others wish what one wishes oneself). This is precisely what Rousseau later does with the developed notion of the general will. The justification Diderot has given is the concept of human kind. “La volonté générale est toujours bonne” (the general will is always good). What each can take is what the rest of “l’espèce entière” (the whole species) does not contest. “Human kind,” for Diderot, is a thoroughly anthropological notion. Diderot argues that this concept will do the work required of it (to found morality), even if “on supposerait la notion des espèces dans un flux perpetual” (one were to suppose the notion of species in a continual flux). This sentence confirms the bio-anthropological context Diderot is using for “human kind.” In a way muted but exciting, it points to work on speciation being conducted by Buffon and his group, and contemporary arguments on the “fixity of species”; Rousseau makes of “dénaturé” a word that is both physiological and moral. For Diderot it is both physiological and anthropological, spiced with a flash of repudiation of Rousseau’s position. For Diderot’s use of the the term “dénaturé” is splitting from the moral sense it has with Rousseau along with its anthropological sense,


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to become part of the thinking round the development of the notion of species.47 One sees here the clear reference to Rousseau through the common vocabulary. But, in Diderot’s context, it points to the work being undertaken at that very moment on the nature of species, that will finally lead to Charles Darwin. Diderot was both fascinated and satirical of Rousseau’s denunciation of reason and of human cultural development, as is evident in his letter to the Abbé Le Monnier, September 15, 1755, the very year of the Second Discourse, expressing a kind of half-agreement with Rousseau: The man who meditates is perhaps not a depraved animal, but I am quite sure that he won’t take long to be an unhealthy animal … I don’t like acorns nor dens nor holes in oak trees. I would need a carriage, a commodious apartment, fine linen, a perfumed prostitute, and then I will very easily do without the rest of the curses of our civilized state.48

The last lines cited here are a quotation of the future Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew). The mechanist view of man, “des combinaisons & des suites d’opérations analytiques,” expressed in “Political Arithmetic” (cited above), is thus the counterpart of a materialist view of man. A fragment unpublished in his lifetime strongly suggests that Rousseau has the article “Natural Right” in mind. Rousseau answers the “Violent Reasoner” as Diderot did before him: Let our violent discussant be himself the judge of our work. Let us show him in art perfected the reparation of all the evils that the arts once begun did to nature.49

This, as Starobinski has pointed out, is the fundamental concept of the remède dans le mal, the means whereby a perfected society can cure the ills society has brought. But Rousseau has decided that the only basis of this can be freedom, as free will. He proceeds to make the connection of political liberty with free will, which Diderot has rejected. Rousseau will therefore renounce the arithmetical view of man, as he gives up the very brilliant, complex causality he developed for the Second Discourse, the “concours fortuit de plusieurs causes étrangères qui pouvaient ne jamais naître” (the combination of several foreign causes which might never have arisen),50 and, finally, the anthropological view of the man of the Second Discourse, renouncing them for the cultural history of the Essay on the Origin of Language.51 In renouncing this scientific, combinatorial, and material causality, and thus renouncing Diderot, Rousseau turns to a causality created by reasoned choice, one beneath which, as many have

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pointed out, ultimately lies an idea which has a religious origin, that of rebirth out of evil. No t e s 1 J.-J. Rousseau, Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by R. A. Leigh, 52 vols. (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1965–1971, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1971–1998), letter 6673, vol. xxxvii, p. 248. 2 However, see J Fabre, “Deux frères ennemis: Diderot et Jean-Jacques,” Diderot Studies, 3 (1961), pp. 155–213. 3 Voltaire seems to have come out of this well in that he made over money to Rousseau as payment for the rearrangements the latter had made. 4 Ninety-seven letters preserved up to 1744, from then until June 1754, one hundred and thirty seven. Only one letter in 1746; two possibly from 1747; one, connected with Le Persifleur [The Debunker] which will concern us below; two in 1748; and two from 1749. 5 Compare the account in Franco Venturi’s unsurpassed La Jeunesse de Diderot (Paris: Skira, 1939). 6 Professor Sraffa’s library is housed in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. 7 “Rousseau assure Monsieur Diderot de son tendre souvenir et lui envoye ce Livre demandé depuis trois ans et dont la guerre avoit retardé l’envoy d’Angleterre.” Unless otherwise noted, the presented translation is the author’s. 8 Professor Nicholas Rodger, personal communication. 9 J. Proust, Diderot et l’“Encyclopédie” (Paris: Colin, 1967). 10 An account of that library is apparently available in an unpublished thesis from the Ecole des Chartes, by Dr. Julie Ladant. Much earlier (in 1737), Rousseau had passed himself off as English, one Mr. Dudding. Among the English he met in Venice in 1743–1744, “deux ou trois anglais pleins d’esprit et de connaissances, passionnés de la musique ainsi que nous” (two or three Englishmen who were full of wit and knowledge, as passionate about music as we were). Les Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 313. Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly, 12 vols. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), vol. v, p. 163. These were likely to be clerks, merchants, or consular staff, as far as one can tell; one can wonder whether Rousseau hadn’t met people who talked to him about Petty. (I owe this reference to the kindness of Dr. Angela Scholar.) But the Dupin library seems the most likely source, given Dupin’s known economic interests: see C. Dupin, Œconomiques, 1745, 2 vols. (Paris: M. Revière et cie., 1913), p. 57, quoting works on China: “L’égalité de condition serait dans la société une source de fainéantise et de misère” (The equality of condition is supposed to be a source of idleness and poverty in society). 11 See Rousseau, Correspondance complète, vol. ii, p. 119, in connection with letter 147 of May 22, 1749.


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12 The fact that several books given by Rousseau to Diderot are in private hands, and not with his library in St. Petersburg, suggests that he removed these gifts before the dispatch of the library. Where their owners can be traced, it appears that he gave them to colleagues. 13 “Les anciens Politiques parlaient sans cesse de mœurs et de vertu; les nôtres ne parlent que de commerce et d’argent. L’un vous dira qu’un homme vaut en telle contrée la somme qu’on le vendrait à Alger; un autre en suivant ce calcul trouvera des pays où un homme ne vaut rien, et d’autres où il vaut moins que rien. Ils évaluent les hommes comme des troupeaux de bétail. Selon eux, un homme ne vaut à l’Etat que la consommation qu’il y fait. Ainsi, un Sybarite aurait bien valu trente Lacédémoniens. Qu’on devine donc laquelle de ces deux Républiques, de Sparte ou de Sybaris, fut subjuguée par une poignée de paysans et laquelle fit trembler l’Asie.” Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 14, French text OC, vol. iii, p. 20. 14 See also A. Roncaglia, Petty, the Origins of Political Economy, trans. by I. Cherubini (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985). 15 The allusions, say the Pléiade notes (OC, vol. iii, p. 1250 n.1) are to Melon, said to be using Petty’s Political Arithmetic. The notes refer to George R. Havens, “Rousseau, Melon, and Sir William Petty,” Modern Language Notes, 6 (1940), pp. 499–503. Corresponding to the belief that Rousseau’s English was minimal, it was Diderot to whom the information was usually attributed: “Diderot qui était beaucoup plus familier avec l’anglais que Rousseau” (Diderot who knew English a great deal better than Rousseau), However, as had earlier been pointed out, Rousseau must be using Petty directly, given that specific mention of the value of the slave in Algiers is found in Petty but not in Melon: Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. xxviii, pp. 142–3. I owe these references to the kind personal communication of Professor Bronislaw Baczko. 16 “60 li. Sterl. Per head, being about the value of Argier [Algier] Slaves.” Sir W. Petty, The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. by C. H. Hull, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1899), vol. ii, p. 510. In the edition described above, owned by Sraffa, p. 16. 17 “The Method I take to do this, is not yet very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the political Arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in terms of Number, Weight, or Measure.” Preface to the Sraffa copy, cited above. 18 “C’est ainsi que l’inégalité naturelle se déploye insensiblement avec celle de combinaison” (Thus does natural inequality imperceptibly manifest itself along with contrived inequality). OC, vol. iii, p. 174; Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 51. The translation in Masters and Kelly fails to pick up the concept of combination through which Rousseau is replying to Petty and thus the Diderot of the article “Political Arithmetic.” 19 “[P]lusieurs s’imaginent être doués d’un si grand génie naturel, qui les dispense d’une marche si lente & si pénible, sans compter que la nature des

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affaires ne permet ni ne demande presque jamais la précision géométrique.” Article “Arithmétique politique,” Encyclopédie, vol. v. 20 “Dans les trois royaumes d’Angleterre, d’Ecosse, d’Irlande, il y en a environ 20,000 ecclésiastiques, & en France, il y en a plus de 270,000. Le royaume d’Angleterre a plus de 40,000 matelots, &c et en France il n’y a pas plus de 10,000.” “Arithmétique politique,” Encyclopédie, vol. v). 21 A. M. Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 142. 22 “Cependant si la nature des affaires le demandait et le permettait, je ne doute point qu’on ne parvînt à se convaincre que le monde politique, aussi bien que le monde physique, peut se régler à beaucoup d’égards par poids, nombre, & mesure.” “Arithmétique politique,” Encyclopédie, vol. v. 23 “[E]t plus encore les entretiens de ce vertueux Philosophe dont l’amitiée [sic] déjà immortalisé dans ses écrits fait la gloire et le bonheur de ma vie, de ce génie étonnant, universel, et peut être unique dont son siècle ignore le prix mais où l’avenir aura peine à ne voir qu’un homme.” OC, vol. i, p. 1115. 24 OC, vol. i, pp. 1103–12. See P. Chartier, Théorie du persiflage (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2005). 25 OC, vol. i, p. 1105. 26 OC, vol. i, p. 1112. 27 Only after the careful comparison of manuscripts was the practical joke thus understood. See M. Hobson, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 1982). 28 D. O’Gorman, Diderot the Satirist (University of Toronto Press, 1971). 29 D. Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, ed. by J. Fabre (Geneva: Droz, 1950). 30 “Je me suis seulement appliqué à la lecture des Dictionnaires et j’y ai fait un tel profit qu’en moins de trois mois, je me suis vu en état de décider de tout avec autant d’assurance et d’autorité que si j’avais eu deux ans d’étude.” OC, vol. i, p. 1105. 31 “J’ai de plus acquis un petit recueil de passages latins tirés de divers Poètes, où je trouverai de quoi broder et enjoliver mes feuilles, en les ménageant avec économie afin qu’ils durent longtemps.” OC, vol. i, p. 1105. 32 OC, vol. i, p. 288; Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 242. 33 This was suggested to me by an undergraduate in history at Johns Hopkins University. 34 Rousseau, Correspondance complète, letter 6673bis, February 1770, vol. xxxvii, p. 286. 35 “Quant au style, un homme qui possède supérieurement l‘art d’écrire imite aisément jusqu’à un certain point le style d’un autre, quoique bien marqué … cette imitation du mien peut être surtout facile à M. [Diderot], dont j’étudiais particulièrement la diction quand je commençais d’écrire, et qui même a mis dans mes premiers ouvrages plusieurs morceaux qui ne tranchent point avec le reste, et qu’on n’en saurait distinguer du moins quant au style.” Correspondance complète, letter 6673, February 26, 1770, vol. xxxvii, p. 262. 36 “Ajoutez les impulsions continuelles de Diderot, qui soit qu’il ne pût oublier le donjon de Vincennes, soit avec le projet déjà formé de me rendre odieux


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m’allait sans cesse excitant et stimulant aux sarcasmes. Sitôt que je fus à la campagne et que ces impulsions cessèrent, le caractère et le ton de mes écrits changèrent, et je rentrai dans mon naturel.” Correspondance complète, letter 6673bis, February 26, 1770, vol. xxxvii, p. 281n. 37 “Quant aux pensées, celles qu’il a eu la bonté de me prêter et que j’ai eu la bêtise d’adopter, elles sont bien faciles à distinguer des miennes, comme on peut le voir dans celle du Philosophe qui s’argumente en enfonçant son bonnet sur ses oreilles (Disc. sur l’inég), Car ce morceau est de lui tout entier. Il est certain que M. Diderot abusa toujours de ma confiance et de ma facilité pour donner à mes écrits un ton dur et un air noir qu’ils n’eurent plus sitôt qu’il cessa de me diriger.” Correspondance complète, letter 6673bis, February 26, 1770, vol. xxxvii, p. 286n. 38 OC, vol. i, p. 350; Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 294. 39 M. Hobson, “Nexus effectivus and nexus finalis: Causality in Rousseau’s Deuxième Discours,” in Rousseau and the Eighteenth Century: Essays in Memory of R. A. Leigh, ed. by M. Hobson, J. T. A. Leigh, and R. Wokler (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993), pp. 225–50. 40 The sociability in which Diderot so ardently believes involves duties to others, and, in particular, to family. Their first quarrel, the Confessions indicate, was over the matter of a royal pension for Rousseau after the success of the Devin de village (The Village Soothsayer): a gift refused for the obligations it would bring. OC, vol. i, p. 381. 41 “[Diderot] abusait de ma confiance pour donner à mes écrits ce ton dur et cet air noir qu’ ils n’eurent plus quand il cessa de me diriger. Le morceau du philosophe qui s’argumente en se bouchant les oreilles pour s’endurcir aux plaintes d’un malheureux est de sa façon, et il m’en avaient fourni d’autres plus forts encore que je ne pus me résoudre à employer. Mais attribuant cette humeur noire à celle que lui avait donné le Donjon de Vincennes et dont on retrouve dans son Clairval une assez forte dose, il ne me vint jamais à l’esprit d’y soupçonner la moindre méchanceté.” Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 326; Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 389, emphasis added. Note here that in this text Rousseau conflates the characters Dorval and Clairville. 42 R. Derathé, OC, vol. iii, p. lxxv. 43 Bourdin, “L’effacement de Diderot par Rousseau dans l’article Economie politique et le Manuscrit de Genève,” in Diderot–Rousseau: un entretien à distance, ed. by F. Salaün (Paris: Desjonquières, 2006), pp. 36–50. 44 “Il n’y aura ni bonté ni méchanceté raisonnées, quoiqu’il puisse y avoir bonté & méchanceté animales; il n’y aura ni bien ni mal moral, ni juste ni injuste, ni obligation ni droit.” Article “Droit naturel,” Encyclopédie, vol. v. 45 “L’homme n’est pas seulement un animal, mais un animal qui raisonne; qu’il y a par conséquent dans la question dont il s’agit des moyens de découvrir la vérité … toutes ces conséquences sont évidentes pour celui qui raisonne, & que celui qui ne veut pas raisonner, renonçant à la qualité d’homme, doit être traité comme un être dénaturé.” Article “Droit naturel,” Encyclopédie, vol. v.

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46 “L’état de réflexion est un état contre Nature, et [que] l’homme qui médite est un animal depravé.” Second Discourse, OC, vol. iii, p. 138; English trans., Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 23. 47 “Droit naturel,” Encyclopédie, vol. v. 48 “Celui qui médite n’est peut-être pas un animal dépravé, mais je suis bien sûr qu’il ne tardera pas a être un animal mal sain … Je n’aime ni les glands ni les tanières ni le creux des chênes. Il me faudrait un carrosse, un appartement commode, du linge fin, une fille parfumée, et je m’accommoderais volontiers de tout le reste des malédictions de notre état civilize.” Rousseau, Correspondance complète, ed. by Leigh, vol. III, p. 174, letter 322, c. September 15, 1755. 49 “Que Notre violent interlocuteur soit lui-même le juge de nos travaux, montrons lui dans l’art perfectionné la réparation des maux que l’art commencé fit à la nature.” OC, vol. iii, p. 479. 50 OC, vol. iii, p. 162; Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 423. 51 See also Hobson, “Nexus effectivus and nexus finalis,” pp. 225–50.

Ch apter 5

If you please! Theater, verisimilitude, and freedom in the Letter to d’Alembert Jérôme Brillaud

“Theater is a prison,” Rousseau writes in his Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater, “a dark prison indeed.”1 This prison Rousseau knows well, having himself been a captivated spectator and, with some degree of success, a captivating playwright. His imprisonment and subsequent escape from the shackles of theater bestowed upon him the authority and, at times, the elation of the survivor. The tone of Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert conveys a sense of victorious conviction, not a reactionary and rancorous diatribe against theater written in the servitude of a monarchy of histrions. Instead, the Letter is composed by a free thinker in a free republic who aspires to liberate spectacles from theater. In the Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau offers a plethora of details on the pernicious nature of dramatic literature and theater houses. On several occasions, he describes theater with metaphors of incarceration: But let us not adopt these exclusive Entertainments which close up a small number of people in melancholy fashion in a gloomy cavern, which keep them fearful and immobile in silence and inaction, which give them only prisons, lances, soldiers, and afflicting images of servitude and inequality to see.2

For Rousseau, theater is not only a corrupted and corrupting art form, as was repeatedly and stridently declared before him, most notably by Plato, Tertullian, and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet; theater is also a space that embodies the tyrannizing nature of the art it houses. Any attempt to censor plays and control actors who inhabit the dark prisons of playhouses would achieve no permanent good, he claims: the prison must be stormed. The storming of the temple of servitude is nevertheless problematic and must be cautiously and systematically carried through, for breaking down the walls of the theater-prison would only liberate corruption and contaminate the world with vice. The fortification of the walls, on the contrary, could possibly sequester evil, but it would also confirm its might without eradicating it. Rousseau’s radical alternative proposes, first, 77

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to eliminate the evil of theater, by turning it against itself; and, second, to break down the wall of the prison, to unfetter theater from the constraints of dramatic rules. The spectacle under an open sky is Rousseau’s solution to the problems posed by theater: a spectacle where free men and women willingly congregate, where the natural order of things is celebrated, where pure joy replaces coercive aesthetic pleasure, where participation substitutes for passive poetic subjugation. The Object of the Letter to d’Alembert The Letter to d’Alembert appeared on October 2, 1758, as a refutation of d’Alembert’s article on the republic of Geneva, published in Volume vii of the Encyclopédie in 1757. The article is best known for the debate on theater that it generated. Even before publication, the article on Geneva received the disapproval of some readers, including the Baron Grimm,3 according to whom an encyclopedic entry about a small republic should not exceed the length of an entry presenting leading countries. In Grimm’s view, the author of the article should have refrained, above all, from expressing his opinion on what Genevese political and religious authorities should permit or bar. The article is indeed long in comparison to those on France and England, for instance. It is generally favorable to Geneva and the Genevese, with the exception of the paragraphs on theater and the remark on the religion of pastors.4 The paragraph on theater accounts for only one-eighth of the whole text, and the remark on Socinianism occupies but a few sentences. Yet, these two short passages motivated one of the most resounding quarrels in the history of theater. In a correspondence between Rousseau and the pastor Jacob Vernes from the early months of 1758, Vernes reveals that he had perceived the polemical tenor of the article and that he had solicited Rousseau’s response.5 However, the letters between the two Genevese never mention the paragraph on theater and address mainly matters of faith. In his reply dated February 18, 1758, Rousseau wrote to Vernes that, despite his reluctance to tackle religious questions, he nevertheless opposed the subjugation of religious conscience to formulas, referring specifically to d’Alembert’s remark that the religion of Genevese pastors is a complete Socinianism.6 Although Rousseau reiterates in the Letter to d’Alembert his reluctance to engage in theological disputes, his silence, as he remarks on several occasions, would indicate his approval of d’Alembert’s accusation. Rousseau’s intention to counter d’Alembert’s imputation is stipulated in the Preface and reiterated in his defense of Genevese pastors at the beginning of the

Theater, verisimilitude, and freedom in the Letter to d’Alembert

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Letter. The editor of the Pléiade edition suggests that the paragraphs on religion and the rest of the Letter on theater were indeed two separate debates.7 I would like to show that, in fact, all three parts of the Letter, the Preface, the paragraphs on religious belief and the pages on theater, consistently condemn the violation of religious and poetic freedom. Convinced by Vernes of the necessity to respond to d’Alembert’s art icle in order to defend the freedom of faith of Genevese pastors, and to oppose the establishment of a theater in Geneva, Rousseau decided to keep his Letter in absolute secrecy until its publication.8 He insisted that his publisher, Marc-Michel Rey, strictly respect the confidentiality of the project until it was ready to be distributed. Rousseau knew that he was attacking the clan of the philosophes on a terrain beyond the confines of philosophical dispute and religious quarrel. In the eighteenth century, theater was applauded by many, and perceived by theorists such as Diderot as a humanizing process, or a school of virtue. Attacking theater in the age of theater was a risky intellectual endeavor, especially since Rousseau was not reiterating erstwhile condemnations but rather proposing a replacement for theatrical productions which would serve his own philosophical and moral programs. Because of the novelty and the radicalness of his position, Rousseau knew that his Letter had to be rhetorically and conceptually flawless. Furthermore, his intention was to reach the greatest number of readers, that the Letter not be perceived as a correspondence between two philosophers. His objective, to reach all of Europe with this incendiary text, rather than merely the limited subscription of the Encyclopédie, was fulfilled. According to Grimm, the Letter motivated over 300 responses and refutations, some of which were written by prominent figures such as Jean-François Marmontel and the actor Florent Carton Dancourt. The Letter is framed by two famous obituaries. At the end of the Preface, Rousseau announces his own death, “I am no more,” which he rhetorically restages at the end of the letter.9 Exhorting the Genevese youth to virtue, he writes: May it transmit to its descendants the virtues, the liberty, and the peace which it has inherited from its fathers! This is the last wish with which I end my Writings; it is the one with which my life will end.10

Having figuratively died after the composition of his text, Rousseau writes a few days after its publication that it saved his life.11 The fictitious death serves a rhetorical purpose: The death of the author within his text affirms and legitimates the independent existence of the text itself. If there is an

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origin of the text to be found, it is less in the form of a person than in another text. The Letter is a text about a text, rather than a correspondence between two single individuals. It is to be read neither as a battle of wits nor as an aggrieved retaliation, but rather as a nonpartisan case study motivated by a biased article on the effects of theater on the population of a free republic. It is telling that Rousseau chooses to reproduce in his Letter the paragraph that d’Alembert wrote on the benefits of the establishment of a theater in Geneva. Rousseau does not fail to notice that the incrim inating paragraph occupies one-eighth of the article. Were it not for the object of this paragraph, Rousseau would probably not have responded to d’Alembert. But, the paragraph on theater poses several problems. Rousseau writes that the “Theater which is not at Geneva, and could be there, takes up one-eighth as much space as do things which are there.”12 Thus d’Alembert’s first editorial error is to have dedicated a large part of his article to an object that is not present in Geneva, while neglecting to mention objects which are present in the city. This paragraph on theater, like the imputation of Socinianism, lacks an identifiable referent; it rests principally on conjectural grounds. Rousseau does not make this error in his reply. By quoting the paragraph on theater which has motivated his Letter, Rousseau identifies the object of his discourse. The presence of a referent becomes the condition sine qua non of the impartiality of philosophical and encyclopedic enquiries; without a referent, supputations run the risk of turning into imputations. Rousseau’s position in this polemical text is one of estrangement from his French cultural heritage, and one of endorsement of Genevese ethics and politics on a more visceral basis. As a citizen of Geneva, he considers it his duty to counter d’Alembert’s attack. His patriotic intentions are nevertheless imbued with a personal motivation: “I must then speak; I must disavow what I cannot at all approve, so that sentiments other than my own cannot be imputed to me.”13 Rousseau’s defense of personal freedom of thought is manifested again in his defense of the pastors who have been accused of Socinianism by d’Alembert: I do not claim, for that, either to judge or to blame the doctrine that you impute to them; I say only that one has no right to impute it to them, at least unless they admit it.14

Imputation, whether in matters of private conviction or religious faith, violates the freedom of personal belief, or individual sentiments. The Letter to d’Alembert can be read as a manifesto against the violation, through


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the use of imputative statements devoid of referents, of both religious and poetic conscience. The existence, if not the presence, of the object of one’s discourse becomes the condition for the freedom of thought and judgment in matters of religion, personal conviction, and theater. I m pu tat ion a n d t h e s u bj ug at ion of r e l ig ious c ons c i e nc e The Letter to d’Alembert is organized into three main parts. The first is dedicated to the defense of Genevese pastors; the second analyzes spec tacles in and of themselves, with a special attention placed on proving their intrinsic vitiosity and on showing in great detail, the moral, social, and economic disruption that theater would create, were it to be introduced in Geneva. The last part of the Letter proposes the replacement of theater by a republican spectacle, the fête. While reflections on the effects that the establishment of a theater would have on Geneva occupy the greatest part of Rousseau’s text, the opening paragraphs deploy a point-by-point refutation of d’Alembert’s conjectural statement regarding the Socinianism of Genevese pastors. “Socinianism,” as defined in the article of that title in the Encyclopédie, is a doctrine that rejects any religious mystery that conflicts with reason. Socinians, for instance, do not believe in the divinity of Christ or the necessity of Revelation. Likewise, the Socinian creed discards any Biblical passages that oppose reason. Rousseau counters d’Alembert’s accusation systematically, questioning, first, the source of the information which motivated the indictment of Socinianism: Many Pastors of Geneva have, according to you, only a complete Socinianism. This is what you declare boldly to the face of Europe. I dare to ask you how you learned it? It can only be from your own conjectures or from the witness of others or from the confession of the Pastors in question.15

It is clear to Rousseau that the accusation proceeds either from d’Alembert’s conjecture or from an untrustworthy third party. It cannot be supported by the pastors’ disclosure of their faith to the Encyclopedist himself. Here lies the first strike of his rebuttal of the argument. Not only is it based on pure conjecture, it also imputes to the pastors the creed and prejudices of d’Alembert himself, or of some deceitful mediator. In writing about the privacy of one’s faith, Rousseau asks, “who knows better than I what I do or do not believe? And to whom ought one to refer on this point other than myself?”16 The ascription to the priests of Socinianism, which does not rest on established facts or first-hand testimony, constitutes a violation

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of their religious conscience. The fallacious method of the Encyclopedist invalidates his proposition, placing him on the side of those fanatics who condemn without sound judgment, and impose their belief system on others. Rousseau’s first salvo strikes simultaneously at the clan of the philosophes and the clergy, by demonstrating that their modus operandi and faulty sense of justice are both heedless of individual religious conscience and detrimental to the personal freedom of faith. While the refutation of the argument might well have ended here, Rousseau continues for several additional paragraphs philosophizing on religious questions and matters of personal belief. He prudently states that he passes no judgment on Socinianism, thus protecting himself from any possible attack on the basis of his own religious prejudice. According to Rousseau, the absence of an identifiable universal reason is compensated by myriad individual forms of reason, all of which are fallible: “When a man cannot believe what he finds absurd, it is not his fault; it is that of his reason.”17 Individual reason is nevertheless instrumental in individual beliefs, as it tests the degree of plausibility and acceptability of a proposition. He explains in a footnote “that human reason has no welldetermined common measure and that it is unjust for any man to give his own as the rule to that of others.”18 The plurality of individual reason establishes the principle of intellectual and religious freedom: since the general limits of reason are not fixed and no one can inspect another’s, here, with one stroke, the proud dogmatist is stopped. If ever peace could be established where interest, pride, and opinionation now reign, thereby the dissensions of the Priests and the Philosophers would finally end.19

The fanaticism of priests and the sophism of philosophers, tools of their respective “trades,” are the consequences of their imperious and universalizing reason. Rousseau’s “duty” in the Letter is neither to proselytize nor to inspect another person’s reason but to expose practical truths grounded in experience and tested by his own individual reason. Another footnote glosses the question of absurdity and individual reason.20 First, Rousseau identifies two types of truths: absolute truths and relative truths. Absolute truths, such as the unquestionable existence of God, go beyond the limits of reason. Reason in relation to such truths can illuminate their existence but never question it, for such absolute truths transcend reason. When reason guided by primitive certitude perceives and illuminates an absurdity – that is, a proposition or mystery in contradiction with primitive certitude – then such a mystery or contradictory proposition enters the realm of reason and can be tested by it.


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This, for Rousseau, constitutes the basis of the argument and the refutation of d’Alembert’s misguided accusation. The absence of an observable absurdity or contradiction in the faith of the pastors exonerates their faith because their individual belief is in accord with their individual reason. Were they to believe in a demonstrable absurdity unchallenged by reason, their faith would amount to that stupid acceptance which makes an animal out of a man, and to that barbarous intolerance which delights in tormenting, already in this life, those to whom it destines to eternal torments in the next.21

However, d’Alembert never demonstrates that such beliefs are contrary to reason. For Rousseau, to believe in something that is in line with one’s reason is not merely acceptable, it is also inalienable, inviolable. Thus, it is only to respect and accept others’ beliefs: one cannot know their individual reason and come to conclusions about what constitutes religious absurdity for them. Therefore, it is never the jurisdiction of Man to judge the private secrets of a religious conscience beyond his own. But since no one has the right to inspect and impute to the conscience of others, whether through religious proselytism or sophistic tours de force, Rousseau himself is not in a position to judge the beliefs of other men. Nonetheless, Man can be the judge of Man’s actions, and Rousseau can be the judge of his and others’ actions, or what he calls “practical truths.” Speaking and writing are, for Rousseau, obligatory defensive actions, which he takes on to defend his city and to defend his views from the imputations of d’Alembert. His letter is meant not as “vain Philosophical chatter,” but as a source of practical truths, truths in accord with both his individual reason and his empirical knowledge of French theater.22 It is precisely on the basis of practical truths, not truths acquiesced by reason in the secret of one’s individual conscience, that Rousseau attacks d’Alembert. This distinguishes Rousseau from the partisan attacks against theater characteristically delivered by patristic and religious authorities from Tertullian on, and, closer to Rousseau, by Bossuet and Charles Desprez de Boissy in 1756. Thus, the first of a long series of questions that Rousseau proposes to address in his Letter is whether spectacles are good or bad in and of themselves, setting aside metaphysical truths not related to the nature of theater. The question of individual belief, understood by Rousseau as an accord between individual reason and personal faith, is transposed from the realm of religion to that of drama. In the Letter, theater is confronted with its theatricality in order to examine whether it contains propositions which do not resonate with its nature. If theater as

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a concept and as a practice does not yield any internal contradiction, then it is irreproachable. On the contrary, if theater is fraught with contra dictions, then the task at hand will be to expose and possibly to resolve those contradictions. But, so as not to misidentify absurdities and contradictions where there is none (as d’Alembert had done in his conjectural accusation of the pastors), Rousseau must first define theater from within, basing his argument on practical examples taken from the French repertory he knows well. V e r i s i m i l i t u de a n d t h e s u bj ug at ion of p oe t ic fa i t h For Rousseau, it is well known, French playwrights and French plays are governed by public opinion. Opinion was indeed the cornerstone of French neoclassical poetics. Opinion, for many theorists, presided over the concept of verisimilitude discussed at great length in seventeenthcentury and eighteenth-century dramatic theories. John Lyons proposes the following definition of verisimilitude: By verisimilitude they [theorists] meant a relationship between what happened in the tragic plot, on one hand, and what sort of events were expected by the play’s audience – or rather, what sort of events were expected to be expected by the play’s audience.23

Verisimilitude, it is important to remember, determines dramatic actions and creates a set of expectations for the audience. As Lyons himself emphasizes, verisimilitude is not subject to empirical rules that would prescribe its reception by the audience. On the contrary, verisimilitude is “a model of expectations created for the audience,” not by the audience’s expectations, based on their individual or communal experiences or reason.24 The primary poetic function of verisimilitude is not to duplicate reality, but to create a perfect imitation allowing spectators to take dramatic illusion for dramatic truth. Verisimilitude is sought in the service of truth, which is the ultimate effect that playwrights were striving to produce in spectators. Verisimilitude can be seen as the agent of poetic coercion which operates as an “invincible charm,” in Rousseau’s words. Unconditionally to acquiesce to verisimilar dramatic actions, even those contrary to reason, constitutes the first principle of neoclassical poetics; but it was also the curse of dramatic representations for someone like Rousseau, campaigning for the freedom of poetic belief. Verisimilitude, according to Rousseau, must first rely on the audience’s willingness to take whatever is represented at face value; and, second, it


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must distort the natural order of things. Rather than serving to perfect moral conduct, plays exemplify and fortify opinions and inclinations: Let no one then attribute to the theater the power to change sentiments or morals, which it can only follow and embellish … When Molière transformed the comic Stage, he attacked modes and ridiculous traits. But, for all of that, he did not shock the public’s taste.25

Rousseau continues in the following footnote: All of this is founded on an evident maxim, i.e., that a people often follows practices which it despises or which it is ready to despise as soon as someone dares to set the example for it … But the constant tastes of a people, its customs, its old prejudices, ought to be respected on stage. Never has a Poet come off well who violated this law.26

The first law of theater is to confirm customs and prejudices; its first “evident maxim” is that spectators agree to believe in actions which are contrary to their natural inclination. When they are presented with the spectacle of contemptible actions, audience members will not test those actions through individual reason. The efficacy of reason on stage and in the playhouse is questioned on many occasions in the Letter. The claim that “it is only reason that is good for nothing on the stage” resonates throughout the Letter. Rousseau demonstrates, for instance, that a Stoic character would not please the audience due to the control he exercises over his passions.27 But reason disarmed on stage has no beneficial and curative effect on the spectators, either. Rousseau rejects the Aristotelian concept of katharsis on the basis that only reason can purge passions, and, as he has established, reason operates neither on stage nor in the audience.28 He identifies one of the most salient absurdities of theater since its Aristotelian codification: theater neither modifies nor corrects morals; instead, it violates common sense: In this sense it would seem that, its effect being limited to intensifying and not changing the established morals, the Drama would be good for the good and bad for the vicious … I know that the Poetics of the Theater claims to do exactly the opposite and to purge the passions in exciting them. But I have difficulty understanding this rule. Is it possible that in order to become temperate and prudent we must begin by being intemperate and mad?29

The flagrant contradiction that to become wise one must first be mad, undermines the foundation of theatrical poetics in the Aristotelian trad ition by simply showing that it does not pass the test of reason, despite its general endorsement by theorists. What is more, Rousseau’s analysis of tragic theater reveals the displacement of the natural order of things caused by verisimilitude in

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the quest for poetic truth. With a famous quotation from Aristotle’s Poetics about tragic and comic characters invoked to confirm his argument, Rousseau proposes that theater corrupts the order of things by representing men below humanity in comedy, and above humanity in tragedy. He comes to the following conclusion about character composition: Here is a well-conceived imitation, which proposes for its object that which does not exist at all and leaves, between defect and excess, that which is as a useless thing!30

For Rousseau, the object of theater is that which is not. Theater thus represents only nothingness. The evident absence of a referential object in dramatic representations is compensated by the blind poetic faith in dramatic illusion generated by verisimilitude. However, the object of theater has not entirely disappeared from dramatic productions. It has been removed from the play itself and relocated in the author and the audience: But of what importance is the truth of the imitation, provided the illusion is there? The only object is to excite the curiosity of the public. These productions of wit and craft, like most others, have for their end only applause. When the Author receives it and the Actors share in it, the play has reached its goal, and no other advantage is sought.31

For Rousseau, the common goal of playwrights and actors is to produce dramatic pleasure for the audience. Spectators will subsequently reward authors and actors with an ovation for having pleased them. Theatrical pleasure is circular; it originates in the playwright and the actors and comes back to them. This satisfaction of the amour propre of the creators of the theatrical illusion depends upon their talents at creating an illusion. The dramatic illusion is an “invincible charm,” which forces the alter ation of the natural order of things. Rousseau gives the example of wise men laughing along at a comedy instead of expressing their reasonable indignation toward the ridicule of their fellow men.32 The nature of this “invincible charm” and the alteration of the natural order imposed upon the audience by verisimilitude constitute the crux of Rousseau’s diatribe against theater. The reformation of theater must involve the reintegration of the object of theater within the spectacle itself. Thus, the presence of the referent in the spectacle will invalidate the poetic necessity of an “invincible charm,” which served to mask the absence of the object of theater. But, before presenting the terms of his reformation of theatrical productions, Rousseau sharpens his argument against French theater by


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comparing the corruption it promulgates with another form of “invincible charm”: fanaticism. In his analysis of Voltaire’s Mahomet, Rousseau extends his observations on the demise of reason in the theater and on the effects of verisimilitude, the “charm” masking an absence. Voltaire’s tragedy, according to its advocates, represents religious fanaticism so as to warn the audience of its dangers. Rousseau demurs: Another reason which tends to justify this play is that its purpose is not only to expose crimes but, in particular, the crimes of fanaticism, for the sake of teaching the people to understand it and to defend themselves against it. Unhappily, such efforts are quite useless and are not always without danger. Fanaticism is not an error, but a blind and stupid fury that reason can never confine. The only secret for preventing it from coming to birth is to restrain those who excite it. You can very well demonstrate to madmen that their chiefs are fooling them; they are no less fervent in following them. Once fanaticism exists, I see only one way left to stop its progress; that is to use its own arms against it. It has nothing to do with reasoning or convincing.33

The digression on fanaticism correlates with the “evident maxim,” that “a people often follows practices which it despises or which it is ready to despise as soon as someone dares to set the example for it.”34 Theater and fanaticism are not only modes of indoctrination; they are also deficiencies of reason compensated by a “blind and stupid fury,” in the case of fanaticism, and the “invincible charm” of verisimilitude and illusion, in the case of theater. Both proceed from “that stupid acceptance which makes an animal out of a man.” When fanaticism and theater emerge from the relinquishment of one’s reason under the influence of political or poetic subjugation, the recovery of reason alone cannot eradicate its corruption. The solution to the problems posed by theater lies beyond reason, and resides in the reinstatement of the object of the spectacle into the spectacle itself. Pa r t ic i pat ion, i f you pl e a s e For Rousseau, tragedies are not intrinsically bad. He finds some beauty in Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon’s Atrée, one of the most controversial tragedies of the eighteenth century. In it, Atreus sacrifices the son of his brother Thyestes, and offers him the blood of his murdered child in a cup. While Rousseau condemns the infamy, and exonerates Thyestes of the adultery he committed with Atreus’ wife (because it is an old crime), he finds that Crébillon succeeds in representing a man true

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to life, who is neither courageous nor completely virtuous. “He is a man and unfortunate,” Rousseau writes.35 His advice to playwrights follows: Would it not be desirable if our sublime Authors deigned to descend a little from their customary great heights and touched us sometimes with simple suffering humanity … The ancients had Heroes and put men on their stages; we, on the contrary, put only Heroes on the stage and we hardly have any men.36

One may read in Rousseau’s commentary on Crébillon’s play a preface to the reformation of theater he will propose at the end of the Letter. The suggestion entails the staging of a man true to nature rather than the representation of heroes who are, in Rousseau’s view, in “excess” of man.37 Yet, pushed to an extreme, the inflation of man into outrageous heroes does not pose the problem of poetic subjugation. For Rousseau, tragedy is less corruptive since it presents “beings so enormous, so bloated, so chimerical” that they fail to fool spectators into taking fiction for reality. Such tragedies, Rousseau argues, do not operate under the “appearance of reason.”38 The “excess” of man in grotesque tragic representations is a case of poetic absurdity, and we have seen, absurdity does not depose reason; on the contrary, it convokes reason to verify it. Those tragedies which represent man as he is, as in Atrée, or as an unbelievable, absurd simulacrum of man, as in Greek tragedy, are acceptable. Rousseau is less severe with ancient Greek tragedy. Whereas Pierre Corneille’s Oedipe and Jean Racine’s Phèdre teach us that “man is not free and that Heaven punishes him for crimes that it makes him commit,” tragedy in Ancient Greece heralded freedom.39 Adaptations of ancient tragic myths invariably denature them, by reforming the original content so as to render it acceptable to a monarchy. Rousseau first exonerates Greek playwrights on the grounds that, having been the first to compose tragedies, they could not have envisaged the future vitiosity of theater. Second, since tragedy originated in sacred cults, its actors were perceived as priests rather than histrions. Third, since the subjects of tragedy were inspired by national history, tragic actors were seen as “educated Citizens who performed the history of their country so that it could be seen by their compatriots.”40 Fourth, as fervent champions of political freedom, the Greeks took pleasure in the demise of tyrants represented in traged ies. Fifth, Greeks did not permit actresses alongside actors; only actors were allowed to perform tragic parts. And, finally, Greek plays were not a commemoration of personal “interest and avarice,” and spectators were not “closed up in dark prisons.”41 Rousseau absolves Greek tragedy so that


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it may serve as an origin for his own model of spectacle. He famously writes: What! Ought there to be no Entertainments in a Republic? On the contrary, there ought to be many. It is in Republics that they were born, it is in their bosom that they are to seen to flourish with a truly festive air.42

The origin is nevertheless superfluous and readily dismissed: I need not have recourse to the games of the ancient Greeks; there are modern ones which are still in existence, and I find them precisely in our city.43

As the origin of all spectacles, Greek spectacles validate the possibility of modern spectacles. For Rousseau, however, the presence of spectacles in Geneva supersedes their origin which can recede in the distant past. The republican fête is quite contrary to dramatic theater in that it is not subordinate to the alteration of the natural order of things, and it is not constrained by the rules that dictate dramatic composition, such as the rule of verisimilitude. Rousseau writes: Let your pleasures not be effeminate or mercenary; let nothing that has an odor of constraint and selfishness poison them; let them be free and generous like you are, let the sun illuminate your innocent entertainments; you will constitute one yourselves, the worthiest it can illuminate.44

This proposition needs to be read in conjunction with one of the most frequently commented-upon passages of the Letter: But what then will be the objects of these entertainments? What will be shown in them? Nothing, if you please … Let the Spectators become an Entertainment to themselves; make them actors themselves.45

In his analysis of this passage, Jacques Derrida has argued that the “signifier is the death of the festival” and that the fête is, according to Rousseau, a “theater without representation.”46 More recently, Denis Guénoun has suggested that, for Rousseau, the condition of a virtuous spectacle is that it be deprived of an object. The spectacle must represent nothing.47 These two commentators emphasize the pronoun “nothing,” making it the operative term in the denunciation of representative drama. Yet, it is precisely dramatic theater which, for Rousseau, represents nothing, as illustrated above. It is important, I would argue, to pay more attention to the clause “if you please,” which makes possible the transformation of dramatic theater into participatory theater. Participation in the theater, becoming at once its object and an actor, must proceed from a free deliberation. That is, spectators become the object of the spectacle, but only

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if they choose to. For Rousseau’s project, I will venture, is to reinstate the eventuality inherent in spectacles, where spectacles satisfy a desire not to see and to be seen, but rather to participate. Participatory theater, in Rousseau’s view, is not a verisimilar event which distorts the order of things and subjugates poetic faith; its appeal resides in the eventuality or freedom of participation, and it is precisely voluntary participation that assigns significance to the spectacle. Participate, if you please! The Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater condemns the subjugation of religious and poetic conscience by the appearances of reason, whether they be philosophical, conjectural imputations, or dramatic verisimilitude. Rousseau proposes to replace coerced and passive participation in dramatic theater by free participation in a spectacle that reintroduces man as its object, if he so pleases. No t e s 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater, in The Complete Writings of Rousseau, ed. and trans. by A. Bloom, C. Butterworth, and C. Kelly, (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004), vol. x, p. 308. All references are to this edition. 2 Rousseau, Letter, p. 343. 3 Ourida Mostefai, Le Citoyen de Genève et la république des lettres: étude de la controverse autour de “La Lettre à d’Alembert” de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), p. 19. 4 For a discussion of this aspect of the article, see Mostefai, Le Citoyen de Genève, pp. 28–31. 5 See letter 616 dated February 18, 1758 where Rousseau mentions that he has not yet had the opportunity to convey Vernes’s message to d’Alembert. In Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by R. A. Leigh (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1967), vol. v, p. 32. 6 “[E]n général je n’aime guéres qu’en matiére de foi l’on assujetisse la conscience à des formules.” Letter 616, February 18, 1758, Correspondance Complète, vol. v, p. 32. 7 See Jean Rousset’s remark on page xxxiv of his introduction to the Letter to d’Alembert in the Pléiade edition (OC, vol. v). 8 I am obliged to Sylviane Léoni’s pages on the secrecy surrounding the publication of the Letter. See Sylviane Léoni, Le Poison et le remède (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), p. 342. 9 Rousseau, Letter, p. 256. 10 Rousseau, Letter, p. 352. 11 Letter to Alexandre Deleyre, October 5, 1758. Letter 699, Correspondance complète, vol. v, p. 160. 12 Rousseau, Letter, p. 253.


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13 Rousseau, Letter, p. 255. 14 Rousseau, Letter, p. 258. 15 Rousseau, Letter, p. 257. 16 Rousseau, Letter, p. 258. 17 Rousseau, Letter, p. 258. 18 Rousseau, Letter, p. 258. 19 Rousseau, Letter, p. 258. 20 Rousseau, Letter, p. 259. 21 Rousseau, Letter, p. 260. 22 Rousseau, Letter, p. 255. 23 John D. Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1999), p. 83. 24 Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder, p. 85. 25 Rousseau, Letter, p. 264. 26 Rousseau, Letter, p. 264. 27 Rousseau, Letter, p. 264. 28 Rousseau, Letter, p. 265. 29 Rousseau, Letter, p. 265. 30 Rousseau, Letter, p. 270. 31 Rousseau, Letter, p. 270. 32 Rousseau, Letter, p. 276. 33 Rousseau, Letter, p. 273. 34 Rousseau, Letter, p. 264. 35 Rousseau, Letter, p. 273. 36 Rousseau, Letter, p. 274. 37 Rousseau, Letter, p. 270. 38 Rousseau, Letter, p. 284. 39 Rousseau, Letter, p. 270. 40 Rousseau, Letter, p. 308. 41 Rousseau, Letter, p. 308. 42 Rousseau, Letter, p. 343. 43 Rousseau, Letter, p. 344. 44 Rousseau, Letter, p. 344. 45 Rousseau, Letter, p. 344. 46 J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by G. Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 306. 47 D. Guénoun, Actions et acteurs (Paris: Belin, 2005), p. 187.

Ch apter 6

Music, the passions, and political freedom in Rousseau Tracy B. Strong

Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind … the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking.1 Hannah Arendt

Arendt draws here upon the concept of “reflective judgment” in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. “Reflective judgment” is precisely not my taking someone else’s point of view, but thinking as myself (“thinking in my own identity”) that which others think. Such judgment thus re-presents the judgments of all those others to whom I make myself present. I will not necessarily agree with them, but I will have had them present while reflecting. In doing so, Arendt observes, I do not take into account “only my own interests.” Yet, if Arendt is right, it would seem that there is no room for such a politics in Rousseau: notoriously, he seems opposed to representation as such. Music, however, constitutes an exception to Rousseau’s hostility to representation and the arts in general. I want here to argue that his understanding of music shows that the problem with most forms of representation is that they make judgment in Arendt’s sense unnecessary or undesirable. On the other hand, Rousseau’s analysis shows that proper representation requires an ability to make emotion while making rational arguments – something for which the experience of music is the model. In Julie, or the New Heloise, Julie writes to Saint Preux that “My heart was so corrupted that my reason could not withstand the discourse of 92

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your philosophers.”2 Elsewhere, Rousseau suggests that the human esprit might be able to perceive matter directly, without reflection.3 In fact, if “the idea that strikes the brain does not penetrate to the heart, it is nothing (nulle).”4 Heart is Rousseau’s word for understanding that is not seated (solely) in rationality. What is the heart? The temptation here is to see in this expression a sign of Rousseau’s premature romanticism, a kind of mushy valorization of feeling over thought. But “heart” here is as in Pascal: “le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point; on le voit en mille choses” (the heart has its reasons of which reason knows not; one sees this in a thousand ways).5 For something to “penetrate to the heart” means, then, for it to become part of the way a person thinks, reasons, acts, and feels, rather than being entailed by those qualities. It is to become part of the constitution of a person rather than an acquired predicate. Why, without this, is an idea nulle? Because it remains unincorporated; it has not been made flesh and given real existence in and through a human being. Rousseau wants his understandings to penetrate beneath assessment to become a part of the assessment itself. As such, one would, as he says of the legislator, practically “change human nature.” These considerations are central to Rousseau and were already a motivating force in the Discourse on the Arts and the Sciences. What was wrong with the arts and sciences? Rousseau entertained a number of responses: they make humans lazy and cowardly; they corrupt the taste; and, most centrally, they “introduce inequality between humans by means of the distinction of talents and the disparagement of the virtues.”6 Importantly, Rousseau resists the claims of “philosophers.” Insofar as the sciences and the arts are claims to final knowledge, indeed, most generally, insofar as philosophy, in particular, is a claim to special know ledge, it will produce only foolishness and contradictions, an attempt to be God-like. Rousseau mocks the most famous philosophers of his period and the “lessons” they have produced.7 In the Confessions, he indicates that when he was reading these writers for the first time (in 1736) he hoped at first to be able to reconcile their contradictions. Now, however, years later, their contradictions have become indicative of what is wrong with what is generally called “philosophy.”8 “Philosophers” seek to know, but they do not look and see. Thus they are blinded by illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions: “Will we always be the fool of words? Will we never understand that studies, knowledge, learning, and Philosophy are but vain simulacra erected by human pride?”9

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T r ac y B. S t rong

The “natural state” of man, Rousseau goes on to say, is ignorance. I read this to be a claim to tell us something not so much about ignorance as about what is humanly natural, as if what we needed in order to be human did not depend on knowing.10 It is not a matter, Rousseau insists again and again, of going back to live as savages with the bears, to “burn the libraries,” and so forth.11 It is not that we have too much knowledge, but that what we have keeps us from being, what Rousseau calls “living.” It is as if human virtue were there in front of us, but our knowledge constantly kept us from seeing it. If knowledge is not virtue, what can make beings like us virtuous? Rousseau’s answer is that all we have to do is be human, a quality, he indicates, that generally escapes us. (Thus John Locke sought to educate a “gentleman,” not a human being; kings, slaves, and bourgeois are not “human.”)12 How would we recognize the human? What kind of language would Rousseau have for the human? Rousseau’s most extended consideration of language comes in the Essay on the Origin of Languages.13 Rousseau’s description there of an “original language” sounds very much like what he is trying to accomplish in his own writing: This language would have many synonyms, … few adverbs and abstract words … It would have many irregularities and anomalies; it would neglect grammatical analogy in favor of the euphony, variety, harmony, and beauty of sounds. Instead of arguments, it would have pithy sayings; it would persuade without convincing and depict without reasoning (raisonner).14

To persuade without convincing is what Rousseau wishes to accomplish in his writing: to change his readers rather than coerce them. But how might this happen? Here the concept of “reflective judgment” – characteristic of aesthetics – is revelatory. The fundamental question of aesthetic or reflective judgment is how to go from the individual to the collective – and, as Hannah Arendt and others have pointed out, this is also the fundamental question of politics. To “persuade without convincing” is thus central to what Rousseau has to say about both aesthetic and political matters and constitutes the link between the two. It is not an accident that Rousseau’s conception of an original language and his sense of his own task resemble one another. The proper model for language appears to be that of music, specifically, that of melody. Languages, he tells us, which are perfectly fixed and precise, rather than musical – such as ancient Greek – are “frigid,” where the written word bears increasingly less relation to the spoken.15 Music is in fact the most human of the arts, “precisely because it brings man closer to man and


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always gives us some idea about our own kind.”16 Music properly produces “moral effects … when it is doubly the voice of nature.”17 We know from the Essay that Rousseau thought that language and music were originally related.18 If Rousseau had not written the various Discourses and the Social Contract, he might very well have passed into intellectual history as an aesthetic theorist, especially of music.19 In the Dialogues, he has the character “Rousseau” say of the subject “Jean-Jacques” that “he was born for music … He discovered approaches that are easier, simpler, and facilitate composition and performance … I have seen no man who is so passionate about music as he.”20 And this strange, dissociated book returns again and again to the relation of Jean-Jacques to music.21 Rousseau’s passion for music, and his conviction that it can reveal what being human consists in, means that music has for Rousseau a political significance. I should like here to read his writings on music in counterpoint to his writings on theater. The standard reading of Rousseau on theater is that he was opposed to it on the grounds that it was destructive of community morals. The source for this judgment is the letter he addressed to his cosmopolitan friend d’Alembert – on the title page of which he lists all the societies to which d’Alembert belongs, while lab eling himself only “citoyen de Genève” (d’Alembert had, on the urging of Voltaire, included in his Encyclopédie article on “Geneva” some paragraphs advocating that a theater be opened there so as to bring together the “wisdom of Lacedemonia and the grace [politesse] of Athens).” Rousseau was not primarily concerned with the supposedly corrupting effects of actors and actresses (d’Alembert had seductively suggested that, with proper regulation, Geneva might have a group of morally well- behaved actors) but with the experience of theater itself. His apparent hostility has two elements: one moral, the other epistemological. On the moral level, Rousseau’s concern is with the status of the audience. He argues that, in contemporary theater, the emotions the audience experi ences are not really their own.22 Thus one can welcome the feeling of being upset or enjoying pleasure, for in the theater “nothing is required” of the audience. By “nothing is required” Rousseau means that our emotions do not have life consequences. It is, as it were, irresponsible to be an audience member – a bit as if one were on holiday from one’s everyday, common, and shared humanity. For Rousseau, this irresponsibility is associated with the experience of an isolation which keeps one from being at home with one’s self, a home which, he is at pains to show, can only be achieved with others.

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The source of this moral danger – of irresponsibility – derives from a second, more basic, quality of theater. Theater is, inevitably,23 representation. Here, Rousseau’s hostility to theater reflects and is reflected in his hostility to representative sovereignty.24 Representation on stage requires interpretation by the audience, whereas a just political society is to be built from that which is so transparent in time and space that it cannot be other than what it is. No matter what its subject, theater cannot be common. And it cannot be the everyday: it involves the perfected, immortal, transcendent, particular self, precisely the self that wants to overlook the common: more like a god than a human being. Contrary to Diderot25 and the Abbé Dubos,26 Rousseau regarded most representation not only as parasitical on reality and therefore less than real (as had Plato before him), but also as predatory of reality, insofar as it breaks down the separation between reality and its representation.27 In the Preface he wrote in 1752 for his comedy Narcisse (just after the success of his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences), Rousseau in fact suggests that theater is linked to philosophy, and the arts and sciences in general, in that it takes us away from the everyday and common in its desire to shape how we appear to others, to distinguish ourselves and stand out. From such an approach, society can only be built on a networking of interdependencies, inequalities, and intersecting personal interests. In such a situation, Rousseau continues, “we must henceforth keep ourselves from being seen as we are.”28 It is true that once we are in this situation, philosophy and theater can give us a simulacrum of virtue, so as to “keep us from the horror of ourselves, were we to see ourselves discovered.”29 In these circumstances, representation can maintain perhaps the appearance of public virtue without that virtue being found in our hearts. Commonality would be, to paraphrase Thoreau, a phrase on the lips of most people, but in the hearts of very few. For those who have no humanity, philosophy and theater can give them the clothing of the human, but they cannot make available the experience of oneself or another as human. It is thus central to Rousseau that the experience of theater is one of isolation of individuals one from the other: “One thinks that one comes together with others at the performance, but it is there that each isolates his or her person.”30 When we are isolated, we have nothing in common: we share nothing. (Note that having something in common also requires differentiation; the notion, suggested by some, that Rousseau wants us to be identical is false and indeed nonsense.) The choice, then, is between being a human being and the theatricality of not being. If being a human being is the result of


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a constitution, then our only other choice is nonbeing. The reason for this is that the common – le moi-commun – is what humans are as humans. Its existence is, we might say, our essence.31 The problem with representation, then, both in theater and in politics, is not just that it induces passivity into an audience, but that some human qualities, perhaps precisely those qualities that mark the human, cannot be represented and be what they truly are. Just as you cannot promise for me, nor meaningfully say for me that I am sorry, and just as Cordelia cannot “heave her heart into her throat” to speak truthfully the words her father would require of her, some acts must be my acts and cannot be given over. You can report my promises, but you cannot make them for me. I alone can perform those actions. Rousseau’s political hostility to the idea of the representation of sovereignty, as well as his opposition to theater, is based on his understanding of the nature of commonality. To adopt a different but cognate vocabulary, the political lies, at its root, in the realm of the performative, and nothing performative can be represented. It is tempting to ascribe this conception to a hostility toward art and a preference for “nature.” Yet such a conclusion soon gives the reader of Rousseau some pause. It is clear that his political hopes rested in an “art perfectionné.” What kind of art would this be? What perfects art? To get some idea, we should look at the art that Rousseau thought particularly his own. Rousseau was, after all, at least initially, a man of the theater but, even more importantly, a man of musical drama (opera, or what he calls “le spectacle dramatique et lyrique”)32 and a musician. In fact, the solution to the questions of theatricality and commonalty can be found in Rousseau’s understanding of music and of the relation of music to language, thus, in opera. The first step here is to realize that Rousseau quietly but firmly sep arates off contemporary spectacle from that of the Greeks. Early in the Lettre à d’Alembert, he notes that the Greeks could tolerate spectacles such as the incestuous Phaedra, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the matricide of Orestes, because they had “reasons to recall these events repeatedly,” as they “represented national traditions” (“des antiquités nationales”). But, he asks, of what relevance to our times is Phaedra?33 There is thus a politics built into the question of the effect of spec tacle. The subject matter of the Greeks recalled and indeed remembered for them events that were a constant presence to them. It thus called them to themselves. But, according to Rousseau, when political relevance is not available to our lives, then “spectacles” become dangerous. Modern plays have nothing that is politically alive and sensuous for us. In addition,

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there is a difference between ancient Greek and modern music. In the Encyclopédie article “Musique” (as well as the one in the Dictionnaire de musique on the same topic), Rousseau writes: “The great defect of our rhythm (mesure) is perhaps a bit of that of the language, and is to have not enough relation to speech (paroles).” He continues: What do I wish to conclude from all this? – That the music of antiquity was more perfect than is ours? Not at all. On the contrary, I believe that ours is without comparison more erudite and more agreeable. But I believe that the music of the Greeks was more expressive and more energetic. Ours conforms more to the nature of song; theirs to declamation. They sought only to stir up the soul, and we wish only to please the ear. In a word, the very abuse that we make of our music comes precisely from its richness; and, perhaps, without the limitations inherent to Greek music, it would not have been able to produce all those wonderful effects of which we are told.34

In what did the excellence of Greek music consist? Rousseau is quite clear about what music can and should be. Music brings separate elements together into a whole, without us knowing it: “For music to become interesting, for it to carry to the soul those feelings which one was to arouse there, all the parts must come together to strengthen the expression of the subject in question.”35 Such a musical unity is achieved, writes Rousseau, in opera: a dramatic and lyric spectacle in which one tries to bring together all the charms of the fine arts in a representation of a passionate action in order to excite, by the means of agreeable sensations, both interest and illusion.36

Contemporary French opera does not, however, achieve this effect.37 In pursuit of what an opera true to itself would be, Rousseau turns to ancient Greek tragedy: “Their theater was a form of opera.”38 We know this, argues Rousseau, because we know that their “language was so accented that the inflections of speech in sustained declamation formed between them substantial musical intervals.”39 The Greeks thus had no need for a separate form called “opera.” “But we,” he insists, “must speak or sing.”40 The important word here is the or – the natural unity of language and music has been ruptured in modern times. Due to the music ality of the language, Greek opera had no need to distinguish between aria and recitative. We moderns, whose languages are not so musical, have had to invent special forms, hence lyric verse. Modern opera thus should have as its purpose the recovery of what was obtained by Greek tragedy. But, in order for this representation to be comprehensible, its signification must be clear and singular. Rousseau repeatedly argues against


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the danger of “double representation” in music. This phrase is used, in particular, to describe the contemporary situation in opera, where the sense communicated by the visual spectacle of staging and characters is distinct from the sense of the accompanying music.41 The dissonance between content and music was the key point of attack in the quarrel between the partisans of Italian and French music of the time.42 But this problem also manifests itself in several different forms throughout Rousseau’s writings on music. The most frequently assailed obstacle to clean musical communication, he maintains, is harmony.43 Beyond the potential doubleness arising from the contrast of melody and harmony, dance and poetry might also come into conflict – or perhaps appear redundant.44 In essence, in all these conflicts, what is missing is unity. Rousseau finds this ideal in all of the arts: All of the fine Arts have some Unity of object … There is, in Music, a successive Unity which relates to the subject, and by which all the Parts, well connected, compose a single whole, by which one perceives the ensemble and all the relationships. But there is another Unity of object, finer and more simultaneous, from which is born, without one thinking of it, the energy of Music and the force of its expressions.45

While the former kind of unity operates on the level of sensual pleasure, the second, more potent unity is achieved through communication with the audience. This unity “is a pleasure of interest and of sentiment which speaks to the heart.”46 This singular presentation of emotion communicates to the auditor by giving him or her a stake in listening (appealing to the “interest”) and by offering emotions for which one is not wholly responsible (the pleasure of sentiment). For Rousseau, music can only represent and communicate when it strives for this singularity of expression.47 Since modern languages are no longer capable of sustaining the appropriate passionate force, composers come to rely on harmony to provide musical pleasure. But this development further cripples music, by separating song and speech to such an extent that the two languages combat each other, oppose each other, mutually deny each other all character of truth, and cannot reunite themselves without absurdity in an emotional subject.48

With these two complementary languages kept wholly distinct, the expressivity and range of representation of each was lessened: music could do no more than conjure emotions, without communicating a moral; and language could only make statements, without the possibility of persuasion.49 Since these two modes of expression are both limited, judgment of music

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and speech is similarly limited: reason has no place in the former, and passion has none in the latter. That said, the matter is not without hope. Rousseau is also clear that, whatever the distance may be between music and language in the contemporary world, the original unity between them persists sufficiently to be at the source of music’s continued possibility of speaking even to the modern world.50 “As soon as vocal signs (signes) strike your ear, they herald (annoncent) a being similar to yourself; they are, so to speak, the organs of the soul, and if they depict solitude they tell you that you are not alone.”51 If, in theater, “chacun s’isole,” in experiencing music, we are united: The actuality of the experience of music is testimony to the existence, or the possibility of the existence of a truly human social bond. What Rousseau is after leads us to the following conclusions. First, in the development of the relation of music to the word, the interplay of music and the word can give the listener access to the emotions of the character without their having to be directly represented. Second, this can be achieved only by the development of an integrated and continuous art form. The door is open here (and the Germans, in particular, were influenced by this work) to what Richard Wagner later claims for his work, that “in my opera there exists no distinction between socalled ‘declaimed’ phrases and phrases ‘sung,’ but my declamation is song withal, and my song declamation,”52 that is, there is a unity rather than a layering of word and music.53 How does the musical model persuade without having to convince? While Rousseau differentiates contemporary spectacle from that of the Greeks, he also distances himself from what had become (and remains to some degree today) the dominant understanding of Greek drama. Rousseau explicitly rejects the Aristotelian idea that the achievement of theater is the “purgation” of the passions – katharsis, a term derived from medical practice in ancient Greece. He writes, I know that the Poetics of the Theater [Aristotle] claimed … to purge the passions by arousing them: but I have difficulty grasping this rule. Would it be that to become temperate and wise one has to start out by being furious and crazy?54

Contemporary French theater thus “purges those passions that one does not have and foments those that one has. Is this not a well-administered medicine?”55 In the Letter to Mr. Burney, Rousseau confronts the question of the relation of the harmonic accompaniment to a melody: The accompaniment of the bass [the tonal structure] is necessary in the simple recitative, not only to underpin and guide the performer, but also to determine


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the kind of intervals, and to mark with precision the intertwining of modulations that have such a fine effect in a beautiful recitative; but, far from needing to make this accompaniment brilliant and obvious, I would rather that it went unnoticed and that it produced its effect without anyone paying any attention to it.56

Rousseau thus rejects one common explanation of music’s potency. He does not refer to its “natural” ability to give pleasure or to point toward a sort of mystical reverence based on its alleged imitation of the transcendental. Instead, he argues that music is first and foremost a human and social practice.57 Music was born in the same instant as speech, for the first words spoken by humans were song.58 But, as languages became less and less bound to the force of the musical pitch that gave words their passionate force, music itself became less effective in representing passion. Music has come to need the supplement of pleasure to bolster its moral force.59 With this separation of language and music, words have become the vehicle of rational communication, while music the means of representing the passions.60 Indeed, whereas d’Alembert placed music in “the last place in the order of imitation,” Rousseau places it highest.61 D’Alembert thought that “all music that depicts nothing is only noise.”62 For Rousseau, in contrast, music makes the passions available in three related ways. These three facets clearly emerge when Rousseau argues that sounds in a melody do not act on us solely as sounds, but as signs of our affections, of our sentiments; it is in this way that they excite in us the movements which they express and in which we recognize the [represented] image.63

First of all, music acts as a signifier for a set of objects or actions not currently present. Instead of using characters (as in theater and novels) or images of objects (as in painting and sculpture), music signifies through memory. Music can act to re-member: “Music does not act precisely like Music, but like a reminding sign (signe mémoratif ).”64 The sounds operate through hearing to evoke responses that were once experienced by other senses, and uses the individual auditor’s imagination as the backdrop for representation.65 Music is thus mine and our own, in a way that painting is not. In the second place, music creates depictions in the imagination of the audience by evoking passions within each individual. Melody, the heart of music, takes its potency from the moral effects of which it is an image; knowing the cry of nature, the accent, number, measure, and emotional and passionate tone which the agitation of the soul gives to the human voice.66

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The third part of this imitation is the recognition of the represented object because it imitates passions known to the audience. (Thus, we remember, Greek tragedy dealt with that which was known to its audience.) Music in effect makes the audience hear things that the senses associate with particular actions, objects, and passions. These are, for Rousseau, part of what it means to understand what something is. Melody is akin to the passions insofar as “in imitating the inflections of the voice expressing complaints, cries of sadness or of joy, threats, groans; all the vocal signs of the passions are in its jurisdiction.”67 The audience does not just recognize the passions being represented (as one might discern the passions represented on stage without actually feeling them), it becomes implicated and submerged within the experience of those passions. Rousseau writes: the chef-d’œuvre of music is to make itself forgotten, so that by throwing disorder and trouble into the soul of the spectator it prevents him or her from distinguishing the tender and emotional songs of a moaning heroine from the true accents of sadness.68

Music is thus, for Rousseau, the model for how we acknowledge the presence in our lives of other humans as humans.69 One feels that music concerns us more than painting precisely because it makes one person closer to another (rapproche plus l’ homme de l’ homme) and always gives us some idea of those who are as we are (nos semblables).70

If humans were not capable of music – if it were not natural to them in the same way that language is – the acknowledgment of others that is a prerequisite for a truly human, just society, such as that Rousseau depicts in the Social Contract, would not be possible. Most importantly, for Rousseau (and contra d’Alembert) music does not represent any thing. It thus provides a model of human association in which diversity is made into unity without any required sacrifice of diversity or a submission to one controlling structure. Rousseau’s theory of music looks forward to one like that of Arthur Schopenhauer, who described music as “a copy of the will itself” and thus as distant from representation as one could be.71 Thus there is no disjuncture between the world and what one makes of it. In Antiquity, writes Rousseau, a harmony of words and music was most evident in ancient Greece: Eloquence preceded reasoning, and men were orators and poets long before they were philosophers … In the ancient festivals, all was heroic and grand. The laws and songs carried the same designation in these happy times; they sounded in


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unison in all voices, passed through all hearts with the same pleasure; everything adored the first images of virtue; and innocence itself gave a gentler accent to the voice of pleasure.72

However, even in Greece, with the development of rationality, forms became fixed; language became “colder and artificial.” “The study of philosophy” plays a central role in this linguistic transformation. By cultivating “the art of convincing, that of moving people emotionally was lost. Plato himself, … jealous of Homer and Euripides, condemned one and could not imitate the other.” With the conquest by Rome and the arrival of servitude, all was lost: Greece in chains lost this celestial fire that burns only for free souls and could no longer praise tyrants in the sublime tones with which it had erstwhile celebrated its heroes.73

Latin is a “deaf and less musical” language than Greek. A society that has a language for political life will value eloquence over the use of public force. But the only form of speech appropriate to a people to whom it can be said “such is my pleasure” is a sermon, and such people are taxed rather than assembled. The acknowledgment of others that arises naturally from a language that retains its connections to music is absent in a society that knows politics only through the language of decree. In a society with no musical language for politics, no one can hear. In fact, their language will have degenerated to the point that no one will be able to be heard in public: Herodotus read his history to the people of Greece assembled out of doors, and he met with universal applause. Nowadays, an academician who reads a paper in public session can hardly be heard at the back of the hall.74

This extraordinary analysis of Greece, complete with its quasiNietzschean condemnation of Plato, reveals a central quality that free society must have for Rousseau. There is to be no disjuncture between emotion and expression, between weeping and words, between meaning and saying. When the two are available to each other, there is no possibility of taking the speaker as other than he or she is. Furthermore, this experience of availability only happens in a manner that makes it available in the same manner to any other person. The conditions of my freedom, as presented here musically, are the same as the conditions of yours. Thus the formula of the social contract is: “Find the form of association … in which each, in joining with all, still only obeys himself and remains as free as before.”75

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For Rousseau, the problem with representation in the theater as well as in the political realm is that it removes human judgment from arenas to which it is necessary. So long as the audience is merely given situations to swallow, or, in politics, decrees to obey, there can be no individual autonomy. More importantly, without the possibility of recognizing others in one’s own practice of judgment, one’s human potential as a social creature remains unfulfilled. The import of Rousseau’s ubiquitous attention to the relation between music and language is to show that to the degree that a language has lost its musicality – its ability to represent emotional intelligence as concinnous with rational argument – it will be unable to persuade or to create real social bonds. The question of representation can be viewed as an issue about creativity in politics, and about the possibility of political theory, more generally. Representation in politics, both in the sense of the presumption to speak for others and in the sense of generalizing about different polit ical contexts, appeared problematic because it denied the presence that Rousseau insisted was essential for sovereignty. What I found, however, was that Rousseau provides us with models of a legitimate sort of political representation. The political theorist can remain a spectator, and political theory can be abstract, but only if the language used does not remove the means by which the theory itself can be judged. A theory that works only in logical terms is insufficient, not only because it is not persuasive – a characteristic necessary to a democratic theory – but also because, in neglecting passion, it fails to make itself available to us as our own. Music holds our attention because it is part of who we are; similarly, political theory must find a language that makes its audience know its assertions as the audience’s own. Otherwise, democratic freedom remains an elusive impossibility: all language with which one cannot make oneself heard by the assembled people is a servile language; it is impossible that a people should remain free and speak this language.76 No t e s 1 H. Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. by P. Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 556. Thanks to Professor Babette Babich for reminding me of this passage. 2 Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, OC, vol. ii, p. 351. Compare “One did not begin by reasoning but by feeling” in Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 380. All translations from the original French are the author’s. 3 Fragment sur Dieu et la révélation, OC, vol. iv, pp. 1046–7.


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4 Dialogues: Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, OC, vol. i, p. 808. 5 B. Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 277. See M. Cottret, “Les Jansénistes jugent de Jean-Jacques,” in Jansénisme et révolution: actes du colloque de Versailles tenu au Palais des congrès les 13 et 14 octobre 1989, ed. by C. Maire (Paris: Chroniques de Port-Royal, 1990), pp. 81–102, especially p. 89. 6 Discours sur les arts et les sciences, OC, vol. iii, p. 25. 7 OC, vol. iii, p. 27. The philosophers mocked are probably Bishop Berkeley, the Baron d’Holbach, Bernard Mandeville, and Thomas Hobbes. 8 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 237. 9 Dernière Réponse, OC, vol. iii, p. 73. 10 This is of course what impressed Kant about Rousseau: that, in his view, we needed no special achievement to be moral. 11 Dernière Réponse, OC, vol. iii, p. 95. 12 See Emile, ou de l’ éducation, OC, vol. iv, p. 57. 13 In the next few paragraphs I owe a debt of provocation to T. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), especially ch. 3. I do not agree with Kavanagh, but his work led me to think in ways I might otherwise not have. Note here that the status of the Essay on the Origin of Languages is in dispute. The Second Discourse passes over language briefly and makes reference to a text to come. Is this the text? See the discussion in Kavanagh, Writing the Truth. It is clear that Rousseau worked on this essay repeatedly. R. Wokler’s Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language (New York: Garland, 1987) is by far the most extended treatment of these issues; he situates the Essay before the Second Discourse. See the discussion in Y. Naito, “La pensée musicale de JeanJacques Rousseau,” unpublished thesis, University of Kansai, Japan (2002), pp. 20–32. See also J. Derrida, De la grammatologie, and D. A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1995). 14 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 383. Rousseau continues by saying that this language would resemble Chinese in some aspects, Greek in others, and Arabic in others. See also: “By cultivating the art of convincing one lost that of moving people (émouvoir).” Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 425. 15 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 392. 16 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 421. 17 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 427. 18 For an interesting contemporary discussion, see the book by the British paleohistorian, S. Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 19 See the material collected in OC, vols. i and v. 20 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 878. 21 The influence of Rousseau on Gluck, Weber, and later German composers is a matter of record. See J. F. Straus, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Musician,”

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The Musical Quarterly, 64 (1978), pp. 474–82. Mozart was himself impressed with Rousseau after hearing a performance of Le Devin du village in Paris. See B. Ebisawa, “Rousseau and the Mozarts: Their Relation Considered,” in Selected Papers, ed. by C. Watanabe (Tokyo: Nihon Art Center, 2001), pp. 65–93. See also A. Livermore, “Rousseau and Cherubino,” Music and Letters, 43 (1962), pp. 218–23; and my “Theatricality, Music, and Public Space in Rousseau,” SubStance, 80 (1996), pp. 110–27. 22 For a good account that situates Rousseau inside a conflict over theater that dated back for more than a century before him, see M. M. Moffat, Rousseau et la querelle du théâtre au xviiie siècle (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970). 23 I say “inevitably” because it seems to me that snuff films and gladiator combats, while theatrical, are, in the end, not theater. See the discussion in my The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), ch. 3. 24 One must emphasize here that Rousseau is opposed to representative sovereignty but not to representative government. See Social Contract, book iii and the extended discussion in my Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), ch. 3. 25 D. Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), especially pp. 66–8. 26 J. B. Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (Paris: J. Mariette, 1733), pp. 420, 429–30. Starobinski has established the importance of Dubos (see his “Introduction” to Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v); see also J. F. Jones, “Du Bos and Rousseau: A Question of Influence,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 127 (1974), pp. 231–41. 27 See, on this general theme, F. Ankersmit, “Pygmalion: Rousseau and Diderot on the Theatre and Representation,” Rethinking History, 7 (2003), pp. 315–39. See C. N. Dugan and T. B. Strong, “Music, Politics, Theatre, and representation in Rousseau,” in Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. by P. Riley (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 329–64. 28 Narcisse préface, OC, vol. ii, p. 968. 29 Narcisse préface, OC, vol. ii, p. 972. 30 Lettre à d’Alembert, OC, vol. v, p. 16. This drew a sharp response from d’Alembert: “On va, selon vous, s’isoler au spectacle … Le spectacle est au contraire celui de tous nos plaisirs qui nous rappelle le plus aux autres hommes, par l’image qu’il nous présente de la vie humaine.” Lettre à M. Rousseau, http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Jean_le_Rond_d%E2%80%99Alembert. 31 See the discussion of the commun or the ordinary in my Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary, ch. 2–3. 32 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 948. 33 Lettre à d’Alembert, OC, vol. v, pp. 30–1; see also OC, vol. ii, p. 251. Hence also Rousseau’s preference for the popular themes of Italian opera over the mythic, monumental ones of French opera, such as those of Lully. 34 See D. Diderot and J. Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de letters (ARTFL


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Project, University of Chicago, 2006), vol. x, p. 898, www.lib.uchicago.edu/ efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc/. In the Dictionnaire de musique, Rousseau suggests rather that those who think Greek music less developed are wrong: OC, vol. v, p. 923. Beatrice Didier in La Musique des Lumières notes that Rousseau’s grasp of ancient Greek music was surprisingly advanced. La Musique des Lumières: Diderot, l’“Encyclopédie,” Rousseau (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1985), p. 43. 35 Lettre sur la musique française, OC, vol. v, p. 305; compare Emile, OC, vol. v, p. 150. 36 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 948. 37 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, pp. 954–5. See also M. Hobson, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 257. 38 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 949. 39 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 949. Here Rousseau anticipates in an uncanny manner Nietzsche’s discussion of Greek music and specifically of the relation of Greek music drama to the Greek language. Nietzsche had read some of Rousseau (in particular the Confessions and The New Heloise) but almost certainly not the Dictionnaire de musique or the Essai sur l’origine des langues. See Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, from the Spirit of Music (New York: Vintage, 1967) and, importantly, B. Babich, “The Science of Words or Philology: Music in The Birth of Tragedy and the Alchemy of Love in The Gay Science,” Revista di estetica, 28 (2005), pp. 47–78, as well as T. B. Strong, “The Tragic Ethos and the Spirit of Music,” International Studies in Philosophy, 35 (2003), pp. 79–100. 40 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, pp. 949–50. 41 Painting, “in the manner which it is used in Theater, is not as subject as Poetry to make with Music a double representation of the same object … it is a great error to think that the regulation of Theater has nothing in common with that of Music, if it is not general propriety that they draw from the Poem. It belongs to the imagination of the two Artists [the musical composer and the stage designer] to determine between them what the imagin ation of the Poet left to their disposition, and to accord themselves so well with this that the Spectator always senses the perfect accord between that which he sees and that which he hears.” Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, pp. 957–8. 42 Regarding the accusation of contresens: see M. O’Dea, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Music, Illusion, and Desire (New York: St. Martins, 1995), p. 24. Compare “De par son origine commune avec le langage, la musique ne peut avoir que la déclamation comme modèle, elle doit en exacerber les ferments expressifs. Le travail du musicien est de souligner les inflexions d’un texte, de mettre les mots en valeur et non de les cacher sous les sons.” M.-G. Pinsart, “Musique – texte – passion dans les œuvres théoriques et musicales de J.-J. Rousseau,” Annales de l’ institut de philosophie et sciences sociales, Brussels (1988), p. 23. The relevant texts of this quarrel have been

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gathered in D. Launay (ed.), La Querelle des bouffons, 3 vols. (Geneva: Minkoff, 1973). 43 On the failure of harmony to stimulate emotions or achieve imitation, see Fragments d’observations sur l’Alceste italien de M. le Chevalier Gluck, OC, vol. v, p. 449: “harmony by itself, being only able to speak to the ear and imitating nothing, can only have very weak effects … It is by the accents of the melody, it is by the cadence of the rhythm that music, imitating the inflections which give the passions to the human voice, can penetrate all the way to the heart and move it by sentiments.” See A. Rehding, “Rameau, Rousseau, and Enharmonic Furies in the French Enlightenment,” Journal of Music Theory, 49 (2008), pp. 141–80. 44 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 961. 45 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 1143. 46 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 1144. 47 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 426. 48 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 416. 49 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, pp. 428–9. Some hope of productive expression is held out: “The quantities of Language are almost lost under those of our Notes; and Music, instead of speaking with speech, borrows, in some part from Measure, a separate language. The force of Expression consists, in this way, in reuniting these two languages as much as possible, and in ensuring that, if Measure and Rhythm don’t speak in the same manner, at least they say the same things.” 50 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, pp. 410–17, especially p. 416: “l’empire des chants sur les cœurs sensibles.” 51 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 421. This entire chapter is filled with claims of the superiority of music to all other forms of representation. 52 R. Wagner, “On the Performing of Tannhäuser,” Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), vol. iii, p. 174. 53 Rousseau’s analysis of this comes in his discussion of récitatif obligé (Diction naire de musique, OC, vol. v, pp. 1012–13). See my discussion in “Theatricality, Music, and Public Space in Rousseau,” as well as P. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica ficta: Figures of Wagner, trans. by F. McCarren (Stanford University Press, 1994). 54 Lettre à d’Alembert, OC, vol. v, p. 19. 55 Lettre à d’Alembert, OC, vol. v, p. 20. D’Alembert somewhat lamely insists that theater gives us good passions by which to combat the bad ones (Lettre à M. Rousseau, p. 4). It should be noted that Rousseau is not the first to have called Aristotle’s understanding of catharsis into question – Pierre Corneille, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and even Voltaire had; Friedrich Nietzsche a hundred years later does the same: his Birth of Tragedy is a rejection of Aristotle’s Poetics, in particular, the doctrines of katharsis and anagnorisis. See Strong, “The Tragic Ethos and the Spirit of Music.” 56 Lettre à M. Burney, OC, vol. v, pp. 446–7.


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57 On the one hand, he battles against Jean-Philippe Rameau’s theory of natural harmony, which is universally appealing. On the other hand, he scorns the “vague and general definitions” that the Ancients gave to music (Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 915). Regarding the connection between music and the divine muses, he writes, “whatever the etymology of the name, the origin of the Art is certainly closer to man.” Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 916. 58 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 410; Origine de la mélodie, OC, vol. v, p. 333. However, contrast Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 695, where Rousseau claims that “song does not seem natural to man … Melodious and appreciable song is only a peaceful and artificial imitation of the accents of the speaking or passionate Voice.” Speech may be natural to humans, but music separated from its original connection with spoken words is artificial imitation. 59 “From this is born the necessity of bringing physical pleasure to the aid of the moral, and of substituting the attraction of Harmony for the energy of expression.” Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 951. “The impossibility of inventing agreeable songs obliged Composers to turn all of their concern to the side of harmony, and lacking real beauties, they introduced beaut ies of convention, which have almost no other merit than vanquished difficulty; instead of a good Music, they imagined a learned Music.” Lettre sur la musique française, OC, vol. v, p. 293. 60 “It seems that, as speech is the art of transmitting ideas, melody would be the art of transmitting sentiments.” Origine de la mélodie, OC, vol. v, p. 337. 61 J. L. R. d’Alembert, “Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie,” in D. Diderot and J. D’Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (1751–1772), http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Jean_le_ Rond_d%E2%80%99Alembert. 62 D’Alembert, “Discours préliminaire.” 63 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 417. 64 Especially with certain familiar songs and melodies. Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 924. 65 “Music acts more intimately on us in exciting by one sense affections similar to those which could be excited by another.” Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 421. 66 Origine de la mélodie, OC, vol. v, p. 342. 67 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 416. 68 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 954. 69 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 924. 70 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 421. 71 See A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. by E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1966), vol. ii, pp. 447–60. 72 Du principe de la mélodie, OC, vol. v, pp. 450–1. In Laws 799e, Plato writes: “Let us affirm the paradox that strains of music are our laws (nomoi), and this latter being the name which the ancients gave to lyric songs, they

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probably would not have very much objected to our proposed application of the word.” 73 Du principe de la mélodie, OC, vol. v, pp. 456–7. 74 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 429. 75 Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, p. 360. 76 Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 429.

pa rt ii

Ch apter 7

The Social Contract, or the mirage of the general will * Stanley Hoffmann

The last word will never be written about the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Jean-Jacques Chevallier1

One would hesitate to add to the enormous literature already written about Rousseau’s Social Contract, if one didn’t have the feeling that there is always something left to say. Many of those who have tried to offer a faithful interpretation of the main themes of Rousseau’s treatise have lost sight of what might be ambiguous or dangerous about them, and have too often presented them as the solid elements of a perfectly coherent construction. On the other hand, most of those who have criticized Rousseau’s thought and found germs of tyranny in his pages, of absolutism in the regimes that were inspired by them, have forgotten the work’s premises and the author’s intentions: that Rousseau was trying to define a social order founded on man’s freedom, the primordial imperative that Rousseau spent his life celebrating. Between these two extremes, there is still room for interpretation, synthesis, and analysis of the main themes of the Social Contract, so as to take into account both the intentions and the results, ideals and reality. The theme of the general will is at the very heart of the Social Contract. The doubts that it has generated, the prestige that it has enjoyed, have given it the status of a myth.2 But there are two kinds of myths. On the one hand, there are ideals which exert a powerful fascination, which may or have been partly or totally realized here and there, thus increasing their force of attraction. On the other hand, there are mirages, by which I mean utopias, which, despite appearances and attempts, cannot be realized, or which any effort at realization can only pervert. These are, at the end of the day, merely individual or collective dreams of evasion. Rousseau set out with a clear question in mind: “I want to find out whether, in the civil realm, there can be a legitimate and definite rule 113

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for administration.”3 The question regards power’s legitimacy: under what conditions must a human being obey the commands of the state? Just as famous is Rousseau’s answer, after having pushed aside the answers he deems bad. The ideal state, and the only one which is worthy of receiving the allegiance of its members, is the state in which “each one of us puts in common his person and all his might under the supreme direction of the general will.”4 Neither the question nor the expression “general will” found in the answer is very new. The question has been asked by political philosophers since Plato. As for the general will, it is a concept used first in a theo logical sense by St. Augustine, who wanted to refer to the common will of all people directed by and toward the love of God.5 Gradually, “general will” has taken on a legal and political meaning, still close to its theological origin, in authors such as Marsilius of Padua, Francisco di Vitoria, and Francisco Suárez, all three of whom grant to the collective will of the members of the community the right to provide its laws.6 For Baruch Spinoza, the ideal state is one that is governed by the will of all subjected only to the command of reason.7 For Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, “general will” is less important than the notion of the general spirit of a society.8 For Denis Diderot, in contrast, the “general will, which is always good,” is what “the individual must refer to in order to know how far to go so as to be a man, a citizen, a subject, a father, and when it is appropriate for him to live and to die.”9 Diderot’s general will thus becomes both a secularization of the concept that St. Augustine or Suárez used – because it is no longer the will of God present in men, but the will of humanity – and a sociological adaptation of Spinoza’s philosophy, for this voice of reason can be found “in the principles of the written law of all the civilized nations, in the social acts of barbaric and savage peoples,” etc. This conception comes very close to the general spirit that Montesquieu wrote about. Nonetheless, the originality of Rousseau runs deep. Through his intentions in writing the Social Contract, he distinguishes himself from his predecessors and his contemporaries. Rousseau’s general will is different from that of his predecessors precisely because he redefines the concept so as to serve his own intentions. This originality is relative, insofar as the problem of the ends of the state is concerned. For Rousseau, the purpose of the state is to preserve human freedom. This is illustrated by the formulas he uses in talking about liberty: “the first of all goods”; “to give up one’s freedom is to give up one’s quality as a human being, to give up the rights of humankind,

The Social Contract, or the mirage of the general will

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and even its duties”; and “by depriving one’s will of freedom, one deprives one’s action of morality.”10 Rousseau’s originality manifests itself also in his conception of the social contract: when the independence that men enjoyed in the state of nature can no longer be preserved, when the social relations which develop among them risk making each person fall under the personal dependence of the richest or the strongest, then it becomes necessary for man, if he wants to save his freedom, to exchange this disappearing primitive independence for a new kind which will be its surrogate. The challenge becomes how to “find a form of association by which each one remains as free as before.”11 Rousseau distinguishes himself from those – whether Plato with his conception of a just city, or Thomas Hobbes with his Leviathan dedicated to safeguarding the lives of its subjects – who consider that the state has ends beyond the preservation of freedom. Rousseau sides with those – including John Locke and Montesquieu – who see in civil society a means of protecting liberty. Rousseau’s defin ition of “law” is close to that offered by Montesquieu: “in a society where there are laws, liberty can consist only in being able to do what one must want, and not being obliged to do what one must not want.”12 Similarly, for Rousseau, the real political problem consists in combining liberty and authority: “the essence of the political body is in the agreement of obedience and of law”;13 the general will is a means of conciliation. Rousseau’s originality is especially evident in his very personal conception of the problem of authority and liberty. Unlike the authors who sought a compromise between authority and liberty, Rousseau wanted to obtain a real fusion. Rousseau, who saw no “bearable middle point between the most austere democracy and the most perfect Hobbesism,”14 was not a man of compromise and of the middle. A parallel between Locke – or those who in France were inspired by him – and Rousseau is instructive in this regard. For Locke, the state of nature is already a kind of political society, which is characterized by “peace, goodwill, mutual help and preservation.”15 Consequently, the liberty which exists in this society, if it still means “independence,” is already limited and guided by morality and rules. The constitution of a civil society and the establishment of a state are the only means to remedy the lack of organization in the state of nature: from this state to the civil state, there is perfect continuity. Man abandons only some of the rights which define his primitive freedom – such as the right to be one’s own judge – in order to preserve the others. This is a compromise solution: man exchanges one part of his independence for liberty understood as participation, and only insofar as this is necessary to

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preserve the rest of his independence. Furthermore, the state plays only an auxiliary role: the creation of civil society is merely a way of consolidating the society which existed already in the state of nature. Those who govern remain different from those who are governed (representative regimes); authority is at the service of liberty without there being any confusion between the two. Finally, the system presents itself as a reasonable transaction between power based on individuals’ consent and their freedom, whose essence remains independence, not participation. This implies that conflicts between independence and participation are still possible.16 The general will is for Locke, as for Spinoza and Diderot, a kind of law of reason which restricts both natural independence and the authority of the state; it is another name for what is, in the older conceptions of polit ical philosophy of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (one could even go back to the Stoics), the natural law that human reason discovers and decodes. This body of principles is said to be established by a God who, ever since Hugo Grotius,17 appears increasingly more impersonal in order to govern the physical universe along with the moral one; God sets the limits of rights and duties; the general will is a moderator that comes from above. For Rousseau, in contrast, the isolation of human beings in the state of nature is total; theirs is an absolute independence indistinguishable from the freedom of animals; it escapes any moral qualification; it is not a value, and one cannot apply the term “autonomy” to it. There is therefore a break, a complete discontinuity between the state of nature and the ideal society, and the passage from one to the other denatures and transforms men: “Give him entirely to the state, or leave him entirely to himself.”18 Freedom conceived as a value born out of human relations appears only in the state; it is to the state that man owes moral freedom, and the state can substitute itself entirely for primitive independence.19 Earlier abilities are abolished and replaced by new rights common to all human beings. From then on, man’s freedom is no longer a negative factor – the absence of personal dependence – but a power of positive action. Moral liberty, like natural independence, allows man to depend only on himself and, in this respect, they are equivalent. However, the moral power which he acquires upon entering civil society allows man to give himself law and autonomy in a situation in which independence resulting from isolation has disappeared, and can only take the form of participation: as the legislator of the state, man is his own legislator. Thus a fusion of liberty and authority results: there is no division between the two.


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In Rousseau’s conception, the link between man and the state is much stronger than it is for Locke. Man as we understand him, the moral being distinct from the human animal of the Second Discourse, appears at the same time as this ideal state, besides which Rousseau sees only illegitimate states and cowed human beings, “dragged by nature and men onto contradictory roads, embattled and afloat.”20 The ideal state is the one which allows man to cultivate fully his new freedom: “only the strength of the state … creates the liberty of its members.”21 Liberty and authority, in a state worthy of its name, are inseparable. Rousseau doesn’t try to reconcile the two because that would assume that a break was possible. The general will in Rousseau is thus not that of natural-law theory. Indeed, for Rousseau, reason becomes active and efficient only in the ideal civil society; in the state of nature, it remains only potential. In the imperfect societies that Rousseau denounces, human passions prevent reason from governing human beings. But there is no general society of mankind given from the start,22 that is, right after the end of the state of nature. Ideal civil society is a voluntary creation of human beings. Consequently, if in a civil society man feels obliged to the state, this cannot be because the laws he obeys are in conformity with the general will of the human species which reason recognizes. Nor is it because the law – as in Montesquieu’s formula – is a necessary relation that arises from the nature of things. Instead, the law issues from man’s own will, but rather than being a moderating voice which we find in us but which comes to us from the outside, Rousseau’s formula for the general will guarantees a fusion of liberty and authority. For Locke, the compromise between them went without saying, and the general will was hardly more than a guarantee of a continuing harmony. In Rousseau, the synthesis is possible only because of an ingenious hypothesis: the general will is the very condition of the union, and not simply of its duration. Instead of being “the natural law of the human species,” the general will is both “a law of conservation of a particular body” (an ideal body),23 and the law of the noblest part of each individual. Man’s freedom consists precisely in obeying the general will; the authority of the ideal state consists precisely in exerting this will. Now, Rousseau is more concerned with presenting the result than with revealing how he has obtained it. Indeed, he has tended to erase the traces of his labor. In his article “Political Economy,” in the Encyclopédie, “general will” is still used in the classical sense; the idea of a fusion of liberty

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and authority is present, but it is the miracle of law which is celebrated as the author of this miraculous fusion. To be sure, Rousseau indicates that the first duty of the legislator is to make laws conform to the general will, but he has not yet bent this concept to his own ends. Even in the Social Contract, where Rousseau gives “general will” a new sense, he describes the attributes and the conditions of its formation better than its components. Our first task, then, is to dissect the notion of general will into its constituent elements so as to show how their juxtaposition guarantees the synthesis of liberty and authority. The general will combines, of necessity, one qualitative and two quantitative elements. In order to obtain the wished-for fusion, Rousseau had to synthesize very diverse psychological and sociological elements. The qualitative element constitutes the very essence of the general will: the imperative of the citizen’s conscience. The ideal state is fueled by the will instantiated in each of its citizens, which leads to the common good. Will and reason must therefore merge: the will of its members drives the community, and the presence of this will allows one to distinguish the association of human beings in the ideal state from the simple aggregate of humankind. But Rousseau harbors doubts about the constraining power of reason alone, for in his view it is not reason that makes us act: “How useful is it for reason to give us light when passion drives us?” Reason can guide us only when will has freed us from passion. But the general will, which is a very compelling force, is a rational will. Rousseau accepts Diderot’s definition: “A pure act of reason, which operates in the silence of passions.” The ideal state is that in which man is obliged “to consult with reason before listening to his inclinations,”24 and is ruled by the “law of reason.”25 This is why some have maintained that the ideal of the general will is a rationalist ideal;26 this is also why there are points in common between Rousseau’s conception and the previous conception of the general will; the general will is, like reason, “indestructible” and “inalterable”; its permanent rightness removes what is arbitrary and unpredictable about will without adjectives. Once the social contract is signed, the general will needs only to be discovered, not created, and this is why the laws which are the expression of the general will find again the declara tive, necessary, and deductive character which they had in the natural law conception. The general will appears as a constant fund; it smoothly replaces natural law – it is as rational as natural law – and laws can be derived from it just as they could be from natural law: “as it becomes necessary to promote new laws, this will be universally obvious.”27 The “philosophers” secularized the general will; Rousseau, by insisting on the


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word “will,” internalizes it, personalizes it, and seems to make it dynamic. But, in fact, Rousseau changes the foundation of will without transforming its nature; the quarrels between him and the philosophers are family quarrels. Moreover, reason, for Rousseau, too, aims at the Good, thus bringing him closer to the philosophers, and Immanuel Kant later follows suit. The general will is the “good will”: what reason alone cannot do, the general will can; it leads the citizen toward the common good indicated by reason.28 This fusion of will, reason, and the moral sense explains why the general will is always right. It also explains the meaning of the distinction between the general will and the particular wills which are oriented toward natural independence, toward passions, i.e., against moral liberty. This is a difference of essence, not simply of targets. One doesn’t ask the people whether it approves or refuses a proposal, but whether this proposal is or is not in conformity with the general will. One expects neither an opinion nor a compromise among interests, but a moral verdict. One can elude the general will, but one cannot extinguish it: conscience is a gift which man in society can put to sleep but cannot destroy; it is an attribute of personality. The Good at issue here is the common good of the community. Kant emphasizes man’s goodwill; Rousseau emphasizes the citizen’s. The miraculous fusion takes place within the community. By reconciling ethics, reason, and will, Rousseau effectively assimilates morality and politics: the general will which governs the state is the only one that aims at the good. As for virtue, in “Political Economy,” it receives a civic definition: it is “merely the conformity of the particular will to the general one.” Through this assimilation, the state, which is the condition for the existence and exercise of the individual’s moral liberty, also receives an active moral role: its mission is to liberate this freedom, i.e., the general will, by removing the passions which weigh on it, and to bring us to “the kingdom of ends.” Rousseau’s writings on the legislator – accurately described as a “revelator” by Bernhard Groethuysen – show this well. The freedom of man in the civil condition is the freedom to want the good, and the state which allows man to give himself his law is the state that leads him to virtue. Thus, despite the initial difference in their intentions, Rousseau ends by finding again his master, Plato.29 To these psychological and moral assimilations is conjoined a fundamental sociological one. Rousseau’s general will assures the fusion of the “good wills” of each individual into a collective person. All the citizens have the same general will in themselves: it is the same common good that

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everyone discovers when listening to his conscience. Thus each of the individual “general wills” and the collective group’s general will are identical, through “the moral being which constitutes the state.”30 Therefore, Rousseau can dismiss both those who argue that the general will is a “collective representation” distinct from the wills of the individual citizens,31 and those who reject any organicist interpretation of his thought.32 The man who wrote that “good institutions are those which best know how to deprive the individual of his absolute existence in order to replace it with a relative one, and to transfer his personality into the common unity,”33 was far away from the purely individualist and contractual theory of the liberal state as neutral umpire. The general will is not merely a sum of individual wills, and it has no additive character; it is one and indivisible. Conversely, as a result, the common body is not different from the individual, or at least not from the moral part of each individual. As Emile Durkheim himself pointed out, there is nothing transcendent in this general will; each one and all of us have all of it.34 The foundation of obligation remains an individualistic one, and one doesn’t find in Rousseau anything which could bring him closer to G. W. F. Hegel.35 The ideal state is, for Rousseau, only a construction of reason, i.e., an artificial one, and it has to turn “love for the fatherland into love of the citizens rather than of the earth,”36 but neither the state nor the individual dominates. The fusion of the individual general wills into a collective general will amounts to a mystical alchemy that Rousseau himself confessed was akin to squaring the circle, and the means he used have an aura of religious mystery. This alchemy, too, rests on dogmas; once again, they are philosoph ical postulates. The character of the general will, which is both subjective and objective – each subject wants the same common good – postulates harmony among the individual general wills, demonstrating, again, that Rousseau was the heir of his century. It is in virtue of this harmony that “individualism in action” can “lead to collectivism in decision.”37 This uniformity of the ends of rational wills presupposes the identity of the content of the consciences; there must be a single Good which is evident to reason. Rousseau, still working within the framework of the community, describes the situation thus: As long as several men gathered together consider themselves as a single body, they only have one single will which refers to the conservation of the group and the general welfare.38

But the reign of the general will also presupposes the identity of preferences; the citizens, whom the legislator will have enlightened about the


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common good sought by civic conscience and who will henceforth see “objects as they are,” must want the good that they see and give it preference over their other, particular desires and passions. This implies that the citizens, identical in their consciences, must also be identical in their acts. They must all be equally patriotic: “A republic supposes that the common values always prevail over the separate ones, that the citizen sees the fatherland before anything else.”39 What Rousseau here envisages is the nation of patriots that Jules Michelet will later celebrate. Given these postulates regarding the essence of the general will, a fusion of liberty and authority does follow. “Liberty” is defined in moral terms; it is obedience to an internal necessity. “Authority” is the rule of this necessity in the state. But can such a fusion last? The potential for conflict exists between men, who may not always want the Good, and the state, which may forget its mission. This, for Rousseau, is the danger against which one must ready oneself. If men no longer want to obey the general will, then the state is lost, but there is nothing to be done against this decadence – precisely because the state isn’t anything more than the individuals who compose it. To say that the state could force individuals to be free presumes that there is only a minority who refuse to obey the internal law. Nowhere in the Social Contract does Rousseau claim that the state must impose the common good on a blind majority. In anticipation of the opposite danger, of a state that replaces its legitimate authority with an arbitrary one not founded on the general will, Rousseau includes two quantitative elements in his conception. The first concerns the possessor of the general will, which is a form of the “will of all.” All citizens must be consulted and a majority must result from this consultation. Even when there is only a minority of conscious citizens, it is not this minority who should exert power. This is a guarantee of the rule of the “good will”; in order for the will which fuels the state to be general in its essence, it must be general in its origin. There are two reasons for this. First, if a minority, reputed to be more conscious or better, were consulted alone, the danger of an eventual substitution of the particular will of this group for the general will would be very great. An agreement between them would be temporarily possible, but it could not last: “For the particular will tends by its nature to preferences, and the general will to equality.”40 There is thus, according to Rousseau, a better chance of excavating the real general will by consulting the whole people. Here one relies on probabilities. But, in addition, if the greatest part of the people were not consulted, civic feeling could disappear among those who compose this part, since in order

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for the general will to rule, each must take the search for the common good as his imperative for living, and it seems likely that people will not do so if they are not consulted. However, beyond the philosophical postulates of the morality of reason and the uniformity of consciences and preferences, a further, political postulate of social equality must be added. This explains the parts of the Social Contract and of the essays on Corsica and Poland which refer to the necessary equality of fortunes and of property: Rousseau wants “neither beggars nor millionaires,” neither luxury nor misery.41 This also explains his dislike for particular groups within the state: they constitute threats against equality, and dangers for the general will. Rousseau wants everybody to be a citizen and only a citizen; all must be in the same social condition and find themselves in the same situation vis-à-vis the state: not that of an isolated person facing a crushing power but of a person tied immediately and directly to the whole community. In addition to ensuring the purity of the general will, the general consultation has an autonomous and inherent value: “Every man being born free and master of himself, nobody can under any pretext enslave him without his consent.”42 As Rousseau conceives it, the freedom of man in society, his autonomy, requires that the consent of every will be obtained. If the law of the state were imposed from above, even if it coincided with the general will of individuals, it wouldn’t be the law they prescribed to themselves that they would obey. But it is by himself and in himself that the individual must find the voice of civic conscience. To say, as some have, that for Rousseau man is free only when he passively obeys the general will, is a misinterpretation. One must not forget that Rousseau required unanimity for the adoption of the social contract “because the civil association is the most voluntary act in the world.”43 The real foundation of the political body is both “the free commitment of whoever accepts obligations” and, above all, the nature of that commitment, i.e., the preservation of freedom. The intention here is an individualistic one, and the requirement of this quantitative element distinguishes Rousseau’s conception from Hegel’s. But it has a value for the political body: a free people is a people that governs itself. In his dedication to the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau explains that this is what, in his eyes, distinguishes the people from the rabble. Now, if one must consult all of the people because there will be a greater probability of arriving at the essence of the general will than if only a few are consulted, then it might seem to suffice to have laws adopted by majority vote. But, if the consultation is dictated by the very nature of


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liberty as participation, then this would seem to require unanimity, as in the adoption of the original contract. To appeal to a mere majority would be to introduce an element of separation between authority and liberty, a distinction between the governed and the governors. Rousseau has foreseen this. To require unanimity would be infeas ible. To rely on the majority would be acceptable only if one repaired the breach introduced by a second quantitative element. It concerns the object of the general will. Like its essence, like its origins, its object must be general. “There is no general will about a particular object.”44 This is because, first, the generality of the object assures that the will of all – in effect, the will of the majority – will not be tyrannical, and that the minority will not be oppressed. Law cannot aim at a specific group of citizens because it must consider “the subjects as a body and the actions as abstract.” The common good, which is the end of the general will, cannot require unequal sacrifices, and the welfare of the state cannot be distinct from that of the citizens. Contrary to Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Rousseau defended the notion that “public salvation is nothing if all individuals are not secure.”45 A second reason for requiring that the object of the general will be itself general is to prevent the general will from being unfair; this is a direct consequence of the general will’s essence as Rousseau conceives it. To all the daring fusions mentioned above, in analyzing the essence of the general will, we have to add one which shows both the kinship between the philosophers’ thought and that of Rousseau, and the way in which Rousseau went beyond them. Here we are faced with a singular mix of utilitarianism and the ethics of duty. Kant will keep only the second element. Rousseau, far from dismissing Helvétius, shares his conceptions but associates them with his own conception of the good. On the one hand, Rousseau remains attached to the idea that love of self is a fundamental instinct. No feeling is purely disinterested except for pity, which he describes so well in the Second Discourse but which later loses its pre-eminence. Each one of us “wants the general good for his own interests,”46 and not only because conscience dictates it; the consciousness of one’s interests is as important as conscience. Durkheim has written about abstract egoism, and this is indeed similar, although there is more involved. Kant distinguishes forcefully hypothetical imperatives – of which the best example is the imperative which considers the choice of means to happiness – from the Categorical Imperative. Rousseau, in contrast, merges the two. Just as the public good and the good of the individual are fused in the essence of the general will, public justice and private

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virtue, and public prosperity and individual happiness, too, are assimilated. In the same paragraph, Rousseau writes alternately of the common good and the common interest47 – not because he believes, like the utilitarians, that the mathematics of interests lead to the common good,48 but because for him the transcendent good and the satisfaction of immanent interests merge. Consequently, if the will expressed by the citizens were to deal with a particular object, it would lose its rectitude. One thinks about oneself when one wants for all. Thus qualitative and quantitative morality are intertwined: a constant aspiration to virtue and a very realistic pessimism about human capacity for disinterested action coexist alongside a quixotic desire to be exemplary and a passionate love of happiness. Rousseau reconciles these through a belief in a virtue without sacrifice, in an advantageous virtue, not an ethics without obligation, but with obligations that are weightless: an “admirable agreement between interests and justice,” indeed! Rousseau assumes here a postulate of mutuality: Commitments which tie us to the social group are obligatory only because they are mutual, and their nature is such that, by fulfilling them, one cannot work for others without also working for oneself.49

Being mutual, these commitments cannot be abused, and the general will remains inalterable. This reciprocity of rights and duties distinguishes Rousseau further from Kant. The latter’s ethic is based on an unconditional imperative: “Act as if the maxim of your action could be turned into a universal law.” Rousseau builds his political ethic on a doubly conditional imperative: act for the common good on condition of also acting for yourself, and as long as other people do the same. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s ideal of justice comes closest to Rousseau’s. The fusion between authority and liberty appears thus to be achieved: Authority cannot harm the citizens; liberty can aim only at the common good; and those who see this good most clearly cannot claim to impose their vision on others. Conversely, not any will of a majority can claim to be the general will, even if its object is universal. The exercise of the general will in the community – sovereignty – appears to preserve the synthesis of liberty and authority which the construction of the notion of the general will has achieved. Rousseau seems to have squared the circle. But is it perhaps true, as Jacob Leib Talmon suggests, that “Rousseau accepts everything in advance … he endorses a priori all the premises of the liberals”?50


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Let us consider, specifically, the ideal society. Its members are psychologically uniform, socially equal, legally linked by mutual ties. They are homogeneous atoms. In order for this ideal fusion to maintain itself, there has to be among those atoms a powerful common feeling which agglomerates them, since the only difference between a people and a mass resides in the existence of such a cement. This feeling plays the role of second nature; it is what allows men – if we may borrow one of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s formulas – to find in the civil condition the spontaneity that existed in the state of nature. This presupposes that the civil condition is itself spontaneous, that it does indeed emanate from the will of individuals, not from an Aldous Huxley-like political conditioning that replaces will with automaticity. In this state, political power is both supreme and limited. It is supreme because the general will is superior to particular wills; it is limited because its essence and its object considerably reduce its domain; the exercise of political power is only one activity among others; it includes only the objects common to all the citizens. But, in order for the individuals to prefer it forever to inferior activities, there has to be a very strong common love, since it is the only common activity. Patriotism is the condition for the rule of the general will; one realizes once more that every synthesis is based on feeling. Finally, one should not forget the dilemma posed by the dimension of the state: even if the patriotism of citizens prevents a dissolution of the community into particularistic groupings, it remains true that too big a dimension risks putting “the spring of public authority” too far from the hearts of the citizens. This is the ideal society, but doesn’t it suddenly appear quite precarious and artificial? Could we be seeing a mirage? It is indeed a mirage, because the general will is a fragile and arbitrary synthesis of liberty and authority. On the one hand, the delicate construction of Rousseau cannot stand forever because it carries within itself the means to its own destruction; on the other hand, even if it could last, the synthesis which it purports to achieve would not be acceptable. The fragility of Rousseau’s synthesis is a consequence primarily of the dubious character of the philosophical postulates upon which it rests. As Albert Camus put it – precisely with reference to the Social Contract, this “new gospel” of the Revolution – “every ideology sets itself up against psychology.”51 And Rousseau’s construction rests on a psychology which is a rationalist act of faith. Against Rousseau, one can argue that there is no reason to suppose that the moral will of all citizens who want the common good will be uniform. In response, one can retort, with Gustave Lanson, that Rousseau doesn’t deal with what

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is but with what ought to be, and that the postulate of uniformity could be vindicated in certain psychological conditions which human beings should seek to attain: the principles of the Contract do not recommend certain institutions as much as they recommend a certain manner of understanding the institutions whatever they may be; the Social Contract would be realized without a revolution the day when, in the conscience of the leader as well as the subjects, the spirit that dictated the Social Contract were alive.52

One might add, in his defense, that Rousseau commences from certain political and social conditions (equality, absence of luxury, austerity, countries of small dimensions) that would first need to obtain, in order for the psychological postulates to be realized. In fact, these replies on Rousseau’s behalf are not convincing, for nothing supports the claim that the principles of the Social Contract could be applied, and lastingly so, if by a miracle the required conditions were one day to obtain. Like classical economists, Rousseau assumes ideal conditions, as if the problem had already been resolved, whereas the real question is how to effect those conditions. Only if the will of all were the general will, i.e., if the will produced by the general consultation were indeed the voice of identical consciences, could one resolve this problem according to the procedure indicated by Rousseau. In that case, one could know the general will by removing from the particular wills “the pluses and minuses which destroy each other” such that “what remains as the sum of the differences is the general will.”53 In any other case, i.e., as soon as the majority no longer wants the common good, the calculation that Rousseau recommends becomes a real trap, incapable of delivering a general will since it is missing from the outset. To cling, under those conditions, to the will of the majority would be merely be a convenient process, the only virtue of which would be its commodity. Of course, Rousseau appears to recognize this himself when he writes, on the one hand, that when the will of all is indeed the general will, there will usually be quasi-unanimity, because those who, through cutting themselves off from the bulk of their community do not hear or will not listen to the voice of their civic conscience, will be very rare.54 Rousseau also appreciates, on the other hand, that if the will of all is no longer the general will, then, however much one counts, whatever position one takes, “there will be no more liberty,” and the minority will lose any guarantee of escaping oppression. In that case, no calculation can produce the essence of the general will; it can only reveal its eventual – and preexisting – presence.55


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But Rousseau provides no indication as to how to realize the ideal c onditions he assumes and in which the general will’s essence will surely be present and could indeed be revealed by simple calculation of the number of voices. Rousseau does provide a variety of “recipes.” There are, first of all, the political and social ones: the destruction of all kinds of particular groups; the realization of social equality, public honors, and rewards designed to give “a shining light to all patriotic virtues”;56 national education; the absence of representatives capable of distorting the general will, etc. Surely, such recipes would be necessary in order to create a state of mind where each person would see and want the common good, but they will not suffice. The society of patriotic atoms to which such tactics would lead would be just as capable of vindicating the nightmare of Alexis de Tocqueville as the dream of Rousseau. Instead of the synthesis of freedom and authority, they would run the risk of favoring a softly pervasive and tyrannical power, which would gradually lead anonymous and isolated individuals to lose their sense of liberty. But these recipes risk being not only insufficient but nefarious: the destruction of intermediary groups, and the elimination of rights reserved against the state leave, in a nonimaginary society, the weak at the mercy of the strong. To be sure, Rousseau supposes that there are neither weak nor strong citizens, but does not this, once again, assume that the problem has already been solved? In a real society, which one would have to reform radically in order to introduce the ideal conditions into it, the changes needed could only be carried out by an extremely strong state, because it would have to reduce one by one the oligarchies, which are everywhere. At the end of the road, one might be closer to the tragic utopias of George Orwell or Huxley, closer to the atoms in the Leviathan than to the optimistic utopia of the Social Contract. In an ideal society – miraculously realized – it would not be much easier to prevent those suppressed groups and their associated rights from regenerating, because any society other than an imaginary one is dynamic and lives through efficient inequalities. The key element of Rousseau’s second recipe, which is a human one, is the legislator, who, while playing his role, is a revealer and nothing more. But this, again, supposes that the problem has already been solved: in order for an “extraordinary man in the state” to provoke “the union of understanding and will in the social body,” there must indeed exist a single good, which, when they see it, men will prefer over all inferior goods. Moreover, how can one guarantee that the revealer will stay within his role? Rousseau, as a good disciple of Plato, recognizes that the legislator cannot resort to reasoning alone if he is to enlighten the people: if

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people were immediately accessible to reason, there would be no need for a revealer. This is why Plato recommends a resort to myth and calls to divine authority. But such a “capitulation to the irrational”57 is inev itably dangerous: who will guard the guardians? In the end, whichever of Rousseau’s recipes one follows, one is faced with the same dilemma: inefficiency or arbitrariness. Rousseau, like the authors of all utopias, places himself from the start in his ideal city. There is always some bad faith in judging those who deal with the “principles of political law” as if they were dealing with the “positive law of established governments.” Strikingly, Rousseau himself has put us on our guard, drawing our attention in Emile to the difference between his view and that of Montesquieu. But whoever proposes an ideal must keep some points of contact with the earth. One must judge utopias not only on the basis of what they are in the minds of their authors, but also on the basis of what they might produce, if one were to apply them to the society of “men as they are,” the people for whom Rousseau claims to be writing. The ideal of Rousseau appears, in the end, as a collection of illusions, a concatenation of fictions. There is the fiction of the collective will, born of the miraculous conjunction of individual general wills, the fiction out of which arose the state’s fictional personality. There is the ideal of the preestablished harmony of these wills; that of the identity – posited a priori, contrary to all of the experiences of regimes devoted to the preservation of liberty, and verified only in oppressive regimes – between the state and society; that of sovereignty considered as a single and magical will, not as a coordinated system of powers. Even the indestructibility of the general will, which supposes a common good as immobile as it is singular, even the survival in the depths of an inalterable civic consciousness, temporarily buried under the mudslide of particular interests, is a fiction. Indeed, the general will is indestructible only because it is fictitious. Without a reference to real societies, the ideal society of Rousseau does not help us much with our real troubles and dangers, just as the liberal economy of textbooks does not always bear relevance to real economies. Rousseau’s sovereign does not resemble the sovereigns of this world. Homo œconomicus and the citizen of the Contract are abstractions, and any attempt at their realization risks a degradation against which it is especially difficult to protect oneself, since Rousseau, champion of sovereignty limited only by its nature, has eliminated any institutional defense. The excessive optimism of the ideal comes, iron ically, from an irremediable pessimism about reality. This is the beautiful dream of a man who did not believe that the real world was capable and


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worthy of such salvation. Thus Rousseau’s psychology is both utopian in its postulates and pessimistic in its utilitarianism. Even at the heart of the ideal city lies a permanent fear of corruption and fall, a skepticism about the capacity of citizens to keep their civic conscience pure, which leads to the precautions taken against groups through the device of the general object, etc. One has to be constantly on one’s guard, for sin is never far away; hence, anguish and vigilance turn Rousseau’s paradise into something which looks a little like the hallucinating “underground” of Kafka: I have organized my underground and it seems successful to me, and yet even now I never have an hour of real tranquility … I don’t have enemies just up there, there are some down here as well.58

We have examined the causes of the fragility of Rousseau’s synthesis of liberty and autonomy. Let us now look at its effects. Various gaps appear in the synthesis built up so carefully, the moment one tries to achieve it. The first results from the excessively abstract character of the desired society and the generality of the willed object. A dissociation arises between the object, on the one hand, and the essence and subject of the will, on the other. Every real society offers a minimum of social differenti ation. Even if there exists a single good, it is possible, and even likely, that unequal sacrifices, different actions, will be required from individuals in order to reach the single good; one sees this dynamic every day. And yet, such inequality is excluded from the outset in Rousseau’s system: there is no way, for instance, to opt for a partial mobilization against a sudden danger. The general will, being legislative, can only have a general object, which cannot be specified by a particular law. And executive power can apply only laws that concern all. In reality, when it is necessary to decide measures that concern only certain social categories, there are only two solutions, each of which destroys Rousseau’s synthesis, based as it is on the fiction of interchangeable and undifferentiated atoms. If, as the first solution would have it, the government is in charge of implementing those measures, then this implies that it does more than apply force to the general will: it has a will of its own, which is a particular will; indeed, it participates in legislation. Accordingly, the sovereign, who is supposed to decide only on general subjects, now has a competitor which is the only one to dispose of force; it is no longer the majority of the citizens that obliges the reluctant ones to be free; instead, it is the small group of the governors. As a consequence, either the state risks being shaken by a conflict between the two wills, a conflict nefarious for both liberty and authority; or else there will be a dictatorship, because the

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particular will endowed with force will usurp the general will: magnified authority will destroy freedom. If, in contrast, the executive is put strictly under the supervision of the legislature (as Rousseau wanted it to be in any case)59 but (as Rousseau feared)60 this supervision turns out to be vain, then the dissolution of the state ensues. Otherwise, one risks making “power” impotent, by promoting a climate of sterile conflicts between a distrustful legislative power that does not have force at its disposal, and an executive which is impotent. This can create an atmosphere of hostility toward institutions, weakening both authority and liberty, as happens always in a weak state. Here, one finds a sort of hidden link between Rousseau and Alain; in any case, it is to “the citizen against power” that this first breach in the synthesis could lead. According to the second solution, the legislator himself decides to take measures that target only certain social groups, such that, even when inspired by a desire for the common good, a despotism of the majority becomes possible. The general will remains right but is rendered tyran nical and may not remain right for very long, since “when it tends toward an individual and determined object, once we judge what is foreign to us, we cannot be guided by any true principle of equity.”61 In this scenario, often considered by Rousseau’s adversaries, authority destroys liberty. Furthermore, after the dissociation between the object and the essence or subject, a dissociation between the essence and the subject of the general will also becomes possible. This is a very serious risk, for the two elements – the will of all and the “good will” – do not necessarily coincide, as Bernhard Groethuysen has shown decisively. The subject of the general will could be any person or group in which the general will prevails, with sovereignty changing according to whether virtue is a quality of the majority or of the minority, as Groethuysen explains: Not to see the difference between the general will and the will of all destroys the infallibility of the general will and insisting on the latter means putting in question the sovereignty of the people.

Groethuysen offers two examples, the first being a contractually based society in which all of the partners have invested the same amount: they have a common interest, but there is no intimate union of the members, no collective-body-expressing society. The second is the community where this union and this body exist but which can function on a hierarchical and inegalitarian basis.62 Rousseau’s general will can be one or the other, but conflicts are possible between these two types of organizations, and as soon as they occur, oppression or disorder reappears in the community.


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The first schism occurs when the will of all continues to be consulted, but the calculation no longer delivers the general will. Instead of the harmony of identical good wills, there is a cacophony of contradictory fancies. This risk exists not only in real societies to which one might try to apply Rousseau’s ideas, but also in the ideal society of the Social Contract. Indeed, since he rejects any kind of representation, there must be a frequent participation of citizens in public life, for all the laws must eman ate from them. Consequently, this perpetual participation can produce automatic responses instead of spontaneity in individuals: direct democracy risks killing democracy in undermining freedom from the inside. Furthermore, given that laws must be rare in Rousseau’s ideal civil society, citizens are reduced to the condition of atoms. Thus society is in no way collectivist (the alienation of goods when people enter into society is followed by a restitution of those goods). Furthermore, because individ uals judge the common good on the basis of what is good for them, the sovereign risks being a lazy sovereign, and the majority will risks undermining the general will. Ultimately, everybody would quietly stay in his own corner, the state would die of inertia, and one would have realized a kind of satisfied and tranquil anarchy. Let us leave the ideal society for a real one. Here the consequences of the schism would be different. First would be the abdication of the people: the will of the people would lead to the rule of a minority or a single leader, and democracy would culminate in autocracy. Nondemocratic forms of social organization, such as the Consulate and the Empire at the end of the French Revolution and later, in the nineteenth century, were chosen by majorities who had grown tired of the burdens of liberty, and particularly of participation in public affairs. In a real society, one must be to some extent content with people as they are, i.e., incapable of providing in big doses the kind of civic heroism that Rousseau demands of them; then, “all, guided by secret motives, no longer act as citizens, as though the state had never existed.”63 The fiction of the single will is replaced by the reality of pluralist regimes: the homogeneous sovereign disappears behind interest and ideological groups which crisscross society and fight one another; the synthesis of freedom and authority is stifled by unstable efforts at compromises between them. Politics, which in the ideal state was both sacred and limited, is now both mediocre and omnipresent; once the common good has disappeared, the particular goods of the groups will vie for recognition and protection by the state. The law is no more than the expression of certain particular wills; freedom is a problem of balance between the antagonistic blocs; and the state is no longer

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a means of human liberation but an instrument of domination. In order to save Rousseau’s construction, to maintain the character of politics as a supreme yet specialized concern, in order to protect the law’s prestige as the oracle of the general will and to preserve the myth of a single and sovereign will, one would have to make compromises and to extract from the real society a smaller society of the social contract so as to lift the latter above the former. This would involve dissociating the nation from the people, restricting the people’s role to the choice of representatives, and turning the will of the representatives into the general and national will. In the closed little world of the representatives and the rulers, political relations would be closer to those of the ideal city, but this world would be separated from the true society, which could not fulfill the exorbitant conditions of the social contract and would be reduced to being a mere floor for the smaller society. This is, in fact, the classical liberal state of the nineteenth century: by applying Rousseau’s vision to the real world, one rediscovers Locke and Montesquieu. The structure remains the same, but the language and the myths are unique to Rousseau. Authority is safeguarded, but it is separate from liberty; freedom, as in Locke, is only partially participation. For the rest, it is independence.64 Perhaps this schism will benefit the general will, which can continue to rule even though it no longer corresponds to the whole people. Rousseau appears to recognize that if only a minority were inspired by the quest for the common good, while the majority looked only after particular interests, then there would be no more freedom “whatever choice one [made].”65 In that case, it appears that Rousseau would side with and entrust sovereignty to the virtuous minority: he suggests in his letter to the Marquis de Mirabeau that “the most perfect Hobbesism” would be the least bad substitute for the impossible “most austere democracy.” In contrast to the smothering of the general will by the corrupt will of all, the latter could be kept away in the ideal society by the requirement of a general object and a general consultation, a possibility decried by the most strident critics of Rousseau. However, Rousseau did not tolerate or encourage this. Still, in the real world, where, unlike in the ideal city, the optimum conditions are not given at the start, this perversion is at least as likely as the contrary deviation: “When a regime is by definition considered as assuring rights and freedoms, the citizen is deprived of any right to complain when he is deprived of them.”66 When a regime pretends that it knows once and for all what human nature is, asserting that man can only want what is good, or else be a criminal,67 that good wills are uniform, and that there exists a single and eternal truth, such a regime


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is potentially totalitarian. In the ideal society, the individual, being both a subject and a member of the sovereign, is free and the possessor of a part of authority; in reality, the result of such a fusion is that, if there are a thousand citizens, “I am one-thousandth of a tyrant and entirely a slave.”68 And so, the mystique of autonomy degenerates into the politics of enslavement; in a world of psychological and social differences, the harmonious but static system of the contract becomes a violent and dynamic system. History is full of examples of the despotism of “legitimate minorities.” It is not so difficult to distort the social contract: modern “legislators” do not go beyond their functions, by substituting themselves for the people, which would violate the social contract. They are instead satisfied with “conditioning” the people, shaping their gestures and words. Having thus deprived them of authentic will, legislators can with impunity literally apply the famous formula and ask the people not to approve or reject their proposals, but simply to say whether they are in conformity with the general will: the letter is safe; only the spirit has been betrayed. Thus, without the form being changed, one moves from the deliverance of deep freedom to the constraints of degraded will. This is a case of the leftwing deviation, that of Jacobinism, “the despotism of freedom against tyranny,” as Robespierre put it. (Didn’t the Terror take the Social Contract as its bible?)69 Kant himself was not always a consistent democrat (in the etymological sense) and allowed, sometimes, that a sovereign inspired by the general will could act as if it were the will of all without any need to consult the people.70 The connection extends even to Marx: in Marxist communism, the deliverance of freedom remains the purpose of society, but it is far away instead of immediate, and paradise recedes farther and farther.71 However, the same is true of the right-wing permutation. Through Hegel, who has completely separated the collective will from the support of the will of all, and also the state from the people, the same conception leads finally to National Socialism, i.e., a regime which has totally lost sight of the liberal purpose, where authority definitively replaces liberty. In this case, again, liberty is pushed aside for an undetermined length of time. Whether the break takes one form or the other, the people have become a mass again, either because they have abdicated autonomy to leaders – whether dictators or representatives – whose will has replaced the people’s, or else because this quasi-mystical unity which glued together the association of its members has been dissolved by particular interests. The American political system shows that both such deviations can occur.

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Given the gravity of the possible deviations, one wonders whether the synthesis Rousseau offers is really one that the partisans of a reconciliation between freedom and authority ought to pursue. Even if it were tenable, would the fusion be morally satisfying? I do not think so; the ideal society would be both unstable and undesirable because, in the last analysis, it would exist at the expense of freedom. One may “make man one,” but is it still a man? Rousseau’s citizen is a truncated person, and his society, which is supposed to ensure the flourishing of men’s capacities, is a closed one. Indeed, the general will described by Rousseau is nothing but the will of a closed society. It stops at the limits – the narrow limits, given its required dimensions – of the community. All interests beyond the common interests of its members are thrown into the same bag, whether they are “inferior” (purely personal interests or those of the organizations which exist in the state) or they exceed the limits of the state and are common to more human beings than are found within the state. All individual interests are regarded as nefarious, as products of passions and sources of heteronomy; the only legitimate end recognized by Rousseau is an end that is common to all and only the members of the community. Ultimately, the logic of Rousseau’s system leads to the drowning of man within society. The word “denaturation”, which underscores the significance of the passage from the state of nature to the civil state, thus takes on a sinister meaning. It is nefarious for the individual, because the ideal which springs from the postulates and aphorisms of the Social Contract is that of a kind of civic automaton who is only a citizen, barely a parent, lover, or friend, not much of a believer, and certainly not a member of any group or any supranational society. Rousseau has replaced the individual – whose essential value derives from his particularity – with a “fractional unit,”72 which has muted any particular will and responds only to the general will, without too much effort or struggle, i.e., without merit. Is this complete social integration still worthy of the word “liberty”? Does this unquestioning obedience still bear any relation to the moral life? “The citizen can perish and man remain,” Montesquieu knew well,73 but Rousseau seems to have forgotten, for he extracts from man but a part of himself. The individual becomes a thing or, rather, a political animal, pure and simple. Rousseau knew that the golden age of the past was irretrievable, but the Social Contract’s golden age of the future is no more accessible. In neither of those two states are there genuinely human beings. In neither of those two states do we deal with the condition which is ours in reality: human


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society, where we find ourselves and must find our way, not as happy beasts (as in the state of nature), nor as civic automata (as in the ideal society). Outside of the ideal state based on the contract, all society is bad: Rousseau, in the Discourses, in Emile, has proclaimed it resoundingly. And once the ideal state is realized, society entirely dissolves into the state. By presenting the state as the only means for man to realize his full civil and moral liberty, Rousseau rejects and denies the value of all other forms of society, including the family, which is the “first natural society” but doesn’t stay so for long, since as soon as the children no longer need the father in order to be safe, “family itself continues only by convention.”74 Also, mankind is out of sight. It is true that there was not and still is not a general society of mankind. If Rousseau rejected this hypothesis, was it because he believed that the voluntary and rational association of all human beings would be realized only at the end and not at the beginning?75 But this end was forgotten by him; the partial communities may have been supposed to be only temporary means of getting to it, but he was fascinated by them and has seen no farther than them. Thus his ideal is deprived of any conception of history that could serve as its framework, just as it has little reference to existing societies. The political conception of Rousseau remains incapable of going any farther in international relations. Unlike Kant, who, starting with an individual imperative and not a social one, starting with man and not limiting himself to the citizen, saw in the nation a simple stage in the accomplishment of this “plan of nature”: a union or at least a worldwide federation of states,76 in which the rule of goodwill would finally be totally realizable, Rousseau has never been able to go beyond the nation: “Any patriot is hard toward strangers: they are merely men, they are nothing in his eyes.”77 The nationalism of Rousseau has often been commented upon. One only has to read his Considerations on the Government of Poland to be persuaded. Because he took as a starting point a closed ideal, he has never pushed beyond it. Finally, when faced by the problem of religion, Rousseau was obviously embarrassed. Nothing is more Kantian in Rousseau’s work than the Confession du Vicaire Savoyard. Here he does not deal with civic conscience but with conscience pure and simple. Like Kant, Rousseau, starting with the individual, leads to humanity. The obstacle of the polit ical community did not block the road. In the Social Contract, Rousseau excommunicates himself: it is not only religion as an institution and as an intermediary body eager for power that he rejects; this would be

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understandable. But he also condemns a religion without a cult, a purely interior one, what “one can call the natural divine right”; indeed, “far from linking the hearts of citizens to the state, it detaches them from it, as from all other earthly things. I don’t know anything more contrary to the social spirit.”78 A society of real Christians would no longer be a society of men, since one cannot serve two masters. In the Vicaire, God was entirely inside each person, the master was simply the most noble voice in man. Now Rousseau enslaves man to the citizen, a perfect being to a partial being. Hence this chapter which is so muddy and confused, unlike all the others, on civil religion: Rousseau, frightened by the logical and necessary consequences of his system, does not go to the end of his thought; he continues to tolerate the diversity of religions as long as their dogmas are not contrary to the duties of the citizens; but what he really requires is that these dogmas consolidate those duties and that their force be added to that of the law. The religion of the nation was, however much he denied it, in the logic of his system; one sees it again when one looks at the Considerations on Poland: “the universal moral God has become the executor of Polish laws.”79 The consequences of this rejection of the universal are very serious, because they destroy the foundations of the construction. One comes back to heteronomy; the necessary effect of nationalism is the fight between national general wills: the triumph of the irrational, since reason is universal; and the general will, conceived as a will enlightened by reason, is condemned to hysteria; accidental differences among peoples will become printed into the very essence of each nation’s general will; the cit izen will be governed by the very opposite of reason. There is no possible autonomy in a closed society. What a paradox! The miracle of national harmony, the ideal of the social contract, risks occurring only in the case of a war among nations. The general will must always be right, not because it is the voice of conscience and reason, but because it is that of the nation (this is not what Rousseau wanted: after all he accuses national religions of putting people into a natural state of war among themselves. But in the same chapter,80 he accuses Christianity of making citizens “passionless toward victory.”) One also comes back to Hobbes, i.e., to a highly relative notion of justice and virtue defined in all sovereignty by each community. An authority limited to the national framework mutilates liberty instead of realizing it. Liberty is spontaneity, movement, and dynamism, but in the city of the Social Contract it turns into a circle and folds upon itself in a closed circuit. Even without the perversions I have mentioned, the ideal city could not really deliver moral freedom. It would begin to do


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so by giving to human beings the advantages of community, but would stop there. It is revealing that Rousseau so often celebrated the Spartan mirage. The true liberal solution is not immediate, like the city which can only be or not be, yet cannot be realized in stages, over time. The true liberal solution is gradual, existential, and dialectic: man’s morality develops through different forms of society, and the state is only one of them, as was well understood by Kant, and later by Thomas Hill Green.81 Freedom is not; it cannot be found already made, as in the inaccessible and isolated ideal city. Freedom becomes. Society is indispensable to the development of human gifts, but any given society is never more than an auxiliary, the mission of which is to remove the obstacles to man’s freedom not, as Rousseau seems to believe, to create it – to force man to be free. Society can allow man to discover and exert his freedom, but no more; in this way, it delivers liberty without any risk of oppression, and the true objective remains the general society of mankind. Rousseau’s solution does not provide any real hope. Everything which separates his two golden ages, i.e., real, historical societies, is considered by Rousseau as incapable of salvation, even worthy of contempt. However, it is precisely in this in-between that we live; we are neither a thing nor a determined essence. By insisting that man be governed not by other men but by laws, one risks that they will end up governed by words, behind which very nonreassuring forces can be hidden: “Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête.” Rousseau’s notion of the general will is a mirage, not an ideal. The mirage reflects an apparent perfection, which seduces human beings lost in the disappointing, imperfect landscapes of historical society. But, like a mirage, the general will moves away as soon one approaches it, and finally leaves whoever sought it poorer and more unhappy than before. In the lives of people, the mirages of philosophers are often no more than “carnivorous idols,” as Georges Bernanos called murderous ideologies. Perhaps the ideal of the Social Contract is, as Jouvenel has written, only a hypothesis for days of sacred national union, usually against an enemy. I have seen it happen once in my years in France: after the Liberation of 1944–1945, following a horrible and disastrous period of civil strife and enemy occupation. It lasted only a few weeks. During my life in the United States, I have also seen it happen only twice, under very different circumstances: after September 11, 2001, and especially at the time of the invasion of Iraq, where the “general will” was largely manufactured by a government that did not hesitate to resort to catastrophic lies.

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Thus my own reading of Rousseau has been informed by my life in the real world. But, in the end, hasn’t everyone who has written about Rousseau revealed just as much about himself? No t e s * Translated, slightly abridged, and adapted from an essay written in 1953 and published (in French) as “Du ‘Contrat social,’ ou le mirage de la volonté générale,” Revue internationale d’ histoire politique et constitutionnelle, 16 (1954), pp. 288–315. More than fifty years later, I still agree with my younger self. 1 J.-J. Chevallier, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, essai de synthèse,” Revue française de science politique, 3, 1 (1953), pp. 5–30 at p. 5. 2 Chevallier, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” p. 28. 3 My translation from Rousseau, Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, pp. 347–470. Henceforward, Rousseau, Social Contract. 4 Rousseau, Social Contract, book i, ch. 6. 5 See on this point P. L. Léon, “L’Idée de volonté générale chez Jean-Jacques Rousseau et ses antécédents historiques,” Archives de philosophie de droit (1936). 6 Léon, “L’Idée de volonté générale.” 7 B. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, xvi. See, on this point, in add ition to the article cited above, Maurice Halbwachs’s introduction to his edition of Rousseau’s Contrat Social (Paris: Aubier, Montaigne, 1943), and A. D. Lindsay’s article. “Benedict Spinoza,” in The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Thinkers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. by F. J. C. Hearnshaw (London: Harrap, 1926). 8 See, respectively, Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, book xi, ch. 6; and book xix, ch. 4–5. 9 In his article in the Encyclopedia on natural law. 10 Rousseau, Social Contract, book i, ch. 4, p. 356. 11 Rousseau, Social Contract, book i, ch. 6, p. 360. 12 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, book xii, ch. 3, p. 162 of vol. i of the Garnier edition. 13 Rousseau, Social Contract, book iii, ch. 13, p. 427. 14 Rousseau, “Letter to the Marquis de Mirabeau,” cited in The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by C. E. Vaughan, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1915), vol. ii, pp. 160–1. 15 J. Locke, Essay Concerning Civil Government, book ii, ch. 3, p. 11. 16 Locke, Essay Concerning Civil Government, book ii, ch. 13, 16, 17, 19. 17 See H. Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, ch. 1, section 10: “God himself cannot change natural law.” 18 Rousseau, “On Public Happiness,” in Political Writings of Rousseau, vol. ii, p. 325. 19 “The passage from the state of nature to civil society produces a very remark able change in man, substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving to his actions the morality which they did not have beforehand … What man


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loses … is his natural liberty …, what he gains is civil liberty.” Social Contract, book i, ch. 8, p. 364. 20 Rousseau, Emile, OC, vol. iv, book i, p. 251. 21 Rousseau, Social Contract, book ii, ch. 12, p. 394. 22 See chapter 2 of the Geneva Manuscript, the first version of Social Contract, which does not figure in the definitive work; OC, vol. iii, pp. 282–9. 23 B. de Jouvenel, Essai sur la politique de Rousseau (Geneva, 1947). 24 Rousseau, Social Contract, book i, ch. 8, p. 364. 25 Rousseau, Social Contract, book ii, ch. 4, p. 373. 26 A. Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934). 27 On this point, see E. Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe: Two Essays, trans. by J. Gutmann, P. O. Kristeller, and J. H. Randall, Jr. (Princeton University Press, 1945); C. J. Friedrich, Inevitable Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948); and E. Wright, The Meaning of Rousseau (London: Oxford University Press, 1929). 28 Jean Lacroix has written that Rousseau’s rationalism is a rationalism of conscience. See in “Notes bibliographiques,” his review of P. Burgelin, La Philosophie de l’existence de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1952), Revue française de science politique, 2 (1952), p. 409. Robert Derathé has shown what the points in common are between conscience and the general will, in Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950), pp. 236–40. 29 For the influence of Plato on Rousseau’s thought, see C. W. Hendel, JeanJacques Rousseau, Moralist (London: Oxford University Press, 1934). 30 Rousseau, Social Contract, book i, ch. 7. 31 For example, the English philosopher Bernard Bosanquet and Maurice Halbwachs. 32 For example, Robert Derathé, Rousseau et la science politique. 33 Rousseau, Emile, book i. 34 E. Durkheim, “Le contrat social de Rousseau,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 25 (1918), pp. 1–23. 35 Notwithstanding the rash assertions of Léon Duguit. See L. Duguit, “JeanJacques Rousseau, Kant et Hegel,” Revue du droit public, 35 (1918), pp. 173–211, 325–77. 36 Rousseau, Dedication to the Discours sur l’ inégalité, “A la République de Genève,” pp. 113–21. 37 E. Barker, Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume and Rousseau (London: Oxford University Press, 1947). 38 Rousseau, Social Contract, book iv, ch. 1, p. 437. 39 B. Groethuysen, J.-J. Rousseau (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). 40 Rousseau, Social Contract, book ii, ch. 1, p. 368. 41 Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, ch. 11, p. 1009. 42 Rousseau, Social Contract, book iv, ch. 2, p. 440. 43 Rousseau, Lettres de la montagne, book i, letter 6, p. 807. 44 Rousseau, Social Contract, book ii, ch. 6, p. 398.

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45 Derathé, Rousseau et la science politique, p. 353. 46 Rousseau, Social Contract, book iv, ch. 1, p. 438. On this point, see Cassirer’s remarks in “The Problem of Optimism,” in Rousseau, Kant, Goethe. 47 Rousseau, Social Contract, book ii, ch. 1, pp. 437–9. 48 Still, he sometimes talks exactly like them: “The equality of the law and the notion of justice which it produces derives from the preference that each person gives to himself and, consequently, from the nature of man,” Social Contract, book ii, ch. 4 (OC, vol. iii, p. 373). 49 Rousseau, Social Contract, book ii, ch. 4, p. 373. 50 J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), p. 40. 51 A. Camus, L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 525. 52 G. Lanson, “L’Unité de la pensée de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 8 (1912), p. 1. 53 Rousseau, Social Contract, book ii, ch. 3, p. 37. 54 “As long as many assembled men consider themselves to be a single body, they have only a single will which corresponds to their common preservation and general well-being … But when the social knot begins to unravel … unanimity no longer reigns in their voices,” Social Contract, book iv, ch. 1 (OC, vol. iii, p. 437). 55 See on this point the remarks of G. Vedel, Manuel élémentaire de droit constitutionnel (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1949), p. 194. 56 Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, ch. 3, p. 962. 57 See, in F. M. Watkins, “The Problem of the General Will,” in The Political Tradition of the West: A Study in the Development of Modern Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 111. 58 F. Kafka, “Le terrier,” in La Colonie pénitentiaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 113–15. My translation. 59 See Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, ch. 7, pp. 975–6, and Social Contract, book iii, ch. 13, p. 426. 60 Rousseau, Social Contract, book iii, ch. 10–11, pp. 421–5. 61 Rousseau, Social Contract, book iii, ch. 4, p. 404. 62 Groethuysen, J.-J. Rousseau, ch. 3. See also the remarks of G. H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 2nd edn. (New York: Holt, 1950), pp. 589–93. 63 Rousseau, Social Contract, book iv, ch. 1, p. 438. 64 See on this point G. Burdeau, “Démocratie classique ou démocratie vivante,” Revue française de science politique, 4 (1952). 65 Rousseau, Social Contract, book iv, ch. 2, p. 441. 66 Talmon, Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, p. 48. 67 See the remarks of W. T. Jones, Masters of Political Thought, vol. ii, Machiavelli to Bentham (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1949). 68 Barker, Social Contract. 69 See C. Brinton, The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History (New York: Macmillan, 1930).


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70 See Kant’s essay of 1793, On the Common Saying: “This May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. by M. J. Gregor (Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially the second part: “Relations between theory and practice in constitutional law.” 71 See also Vedel, Manuel élémentaire, titre ii, ch. 1. 72 Rousseau, Emile, book i, pp. 122–7. 73 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, book x, ch. 3, p. 147. 74 Rousseau, Social Contract, book i, ch. 2, p. 352. On this point, see Derathé, Rousseau et la science politique, p. 188. 75 See the first draft of the Social Contract, pp. 282–8. 76 See especially his essay of 1784: Idée d’une histoire universelle à fin cosmopolite. 77 Rousseau, Emile, book i. See also Judgment on the project of perpetual peace by Abbé de Saint-Pierre: a European league “would perhaps do more evil all at once than it would prevent over centuries.” Ecrits sur l’abbé de Saint-Pierre, pp. 591–615, p. 600. See also Saint Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace, p. 100, in S. Hoffmann and David P. Fidler, Rousseau and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 78 Rousseau, Social Contract, book iv, ch. 8, p. 465. 79 Groethuysen, J.-J. Rousseau, p. 269. 80 Rousseau, Social Contract, book iv, ch. 8, p. 466–7. 81 See T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (London: Longmans, 1941).

Ch apter 8

“Par le bon usage de ma liberté”: freedom and Rousseau’s reconstituted Christianity Jason Neidleman

Though one would scarcely know it from the Anglophone commentaries on his work, Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought and wrote a great deal about religious questions, ultimately producing what amounts to a comprehensive theology.1 Substantively, Rousseau’s religious thought was similar to the deism common to many eighteenth-century philosophers: belief in God, the afterlife, the punishment of the wicked, and tolerance for doctrinal differences. What distinguished him from most of his contemporaries was the political role he envisioned for religion. While most eighteenth-century deists were concerned primarily to divest religious leaders of any political authority, Rousseau hoped to preserve a role for religion in political life. Acutely sensitive to the dangers posed by religion to the freedom of citizens, Rousseau nevertheless believed religion to be indispensable to republican societies. These societies, he argued, must find a way of eliminating the repressive tendencies of established religion while preserving the salutary aspects of religious communion. Toward that end, Rousseau’s writings on religion reimagine traditional Christianity in terms that honor individual conscience. Under Rousseau’s reconstituted principles of Christian devotion, respect for personal liberty becomes more than an article of political expedience – it is transformed into an obligation of faith. Rousseau’s critique of Christianity can be broadly described as twofold. The more familiar criticism pertains to Christianity’s cosmopolitanism – its excessive generality – which Rousseau described as incompatible with the republican requirement of civic unity.2 However, of even greater concern to Rousseau was Christianity’s tendency toward sectarianism – its excessive particularity – which he regarded as incompatible with personal liberty. This chapter focuses on this latter concern, the problem of Christianity’s excessive particularity, and explores Rousseau’s attempts to render Christianity compatible with personal liberty. However, in studying Rousseau’s response to the problem of excessive particularity, we will also gain insight into the problem of excessive generality. This is because 142

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Rousseau’s attempt to reconcile Christianity with personal liberty tells us something about how republican societies might go about particularizing a civic faith while respecting the individual’s freedom of conscience. T r a di t ion a l C h r i s t i a n i t y a n d t h e qu e s t ion of f r e e d om In his writings on religion, Rousseau frequently emphasized the import ance of freedom to piety. This passage, from the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,”3 is representative: I no longer sense that I am anything but the work and the instrument of the great Being who wants what is good, who does it, and who will do what is good for me through the conjunction of my will and His and through the good use of my liberty.4

Rousseau’s writings on religious freedom, like his writings on political freedom, fuse volonté (will) with its bon usage (good use). First and foremost, freedom requires voluntarism for Rousseau: it is willful. However, freedom is not only voluntarism; it is not the obliteration of all constraints. It is, rather, the freedom to make “good use” of one’s faculties – a conception that refuses both the Christian interpretation of freedom as surrender to the “Holy Spirit” and the Hobbesian view of freedom as incompatible with constraint.5 Religious freedom is analogous to “moral freedom,” as Rousseau defined it in the Social Contract: “obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself.”6 It requires an autonomous will that constrains itself based on principles derived from inner sentiment rather than external doctrines or mores. Rousseau argued that traditional Christianity posed two main concerns with respect to this conception of religious liberty: first, the insertion of intermediaries between believers and God; and, second, the denial of human beings’ original goodness.7 The former inhibits the liberty of believers to cultivate a personal relationship with the Divine, while the latter precludes self-sufficiency with respect to earthly happiness and eternal salvation. The first concern led Rousseau to question the authority of the clergy, even of Scripture itself; the second led him to question the doctrines of original sin and grace, as well intercessory prayer. The problem of mediation Rousseau did not refer to himself as a Christian until it became necessary to defend himself against charges of heresy issued by the government of

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Geneva after the publication of Emile. At that point Rousseau declared his fidelity to Christianity, but hastened to add that he understood his declaration to put him in the company of everyone “of good faith who reasons.”8 This religious liberalism was grounded as much in theology as it was in politics. It derived from Rousseau’s belief that God’s goodness is expansive and can never be captured in commandments. Scripture and doctrine are at best reflections of God’s goodness, which itself inheres not in commandments but in a personal relationship with the Divine. Jesus cared little for doctrine, Rousseau insisted, requiring his followers only to believe in what was necessary to be good: “The person who loves his brother has fulfilled the Law.”9 Holiness, Rousseau believed, is super abundant; faith must, therefore, be modest and tolerant: open to the perception of the Divine. Contemporary Calvinist Marilynne Robinson captures what I take to be Rousseau’s conception of the Divine: I believe holiness is a given of our being which, essentially we cannot add to or diminish and whose character and reality are fully known only to God and fully valued only by him. What I might call personal holiness is hopeness to the perception of the holy.10

Rousseau’s faith yielded openness as opposed to certainty. The religious spirit he sought was not surrender to authority but surrender to mystery. Rousseau conceded that he was not in possession of a “robust faith which never doubts anything.”11 He was not after resolution of every moral dilemma, a level of certainty he did not believe to be humanly attainable. Intermediaries who suggest the contrary are guilty of arrogance and should be disregarded.12 Rousseau’s faith was grounded in an acceptance of God’s infinite wisdom and humanity’s relative limitations. It disallowed dogmatism, facilitating what Rousseau hoped would be willingness within the individual believer to hear God’s voice and be awed by it. Original sin Rousseau wanted to restore individual agency, with respect to not only religious communion but also personal salvation. According to Christian orthodoxy, Jesus Christ’s intercession is required for salvation, because human beings are constitutively marked by original sin. Original sin creates an insufficiency in the soul, which can only be made whole by turning toward Jesus. Although Rousseau agreed that the human soul is


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marked by an insufficiency, he attributed that insufficiency to the process of civilization and socialization, not to a constitutive flaw in human nature. For Rousseau, human nature is itself our redemption, the source of salvation, the thing toward which we must turn if we are to escape our sinful tendencies. This return to oneself, to one’s nature, is not a turning away from God in Rousseau’s view but a turn toward Him. God, Rousseau believed, has given humanity everything it needs to be happy. Salvation is, therefore, available in this life, if one turns toward God and follows the example manifested in the life of Jesus. In his writings on religion, Rousseau remained true to his fundamental principle that humanity’s problems are of their own making.13 We are, therefore, wholly responsible for our own happiness and wholly capable of reclaiming it. By contrast, the doctrines of original sin and grace, along with prayers for God’s intervention, compel believers to turn to external authorities, whether that authority be God, the clergy, or Scripture. All of these principles of traditional Christianity must be revised in the face of Rousseau’s commitment to individual independence and self-sufficiency. Original goodness – not original sin – is the first principle of Rousseau’s radical new theology, and if religion is to be redemptive, Rousseau insisted that it be rendered consistent with this principle. In the doctrine of predestination and the practice of intercessory prayer, Rousseau saw the renunciation of humanity’s God-given faculties. He treated them as offenses against God, because the implicit assumption of both is that our God-given faculties are insufficient.14 God has given us all that we need to understand His wisdom: What purity of morality, what dogma useful to man and honorable to his Author can I derive from a positive doctrine which I cannot derive without it from the good use of my faculties?15

In order for this to make sense, it cannot be the case that human beings are “born into sin,” born, that is, with a constitutive lack or insufficiency. While Rousseau understood the importance of renouncing sin and turning to God, he believed that sin is not original, not a reflection of human nature but, rather, a product of social corruption. Whereas the traditional Christian narrative points toward the afterlife as the only path to redemption, Rousseau believed redemption to be available in this life, provided we turn away from the seductions of modern society and return to the simple pleasures of communion. Rousseau’s piety was premised on the view that this life is good, that we should rejoice in our participation in it and be grateful to God for it.

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In order to accommodate these concerns, Rousseau was compelled to reinterpret traditional Christianity. In what follows, I outline the positive principles of Rousseau’s revised theology. In addition to creating a space for religious liberty, these principles also constitute a guide to the bon usage of that liberty. Autonomy Rousseau does not use the word “autonomie,” but the term is useful as a means of capturing his aversion to what he called “party men” and his emphasis on following one’s heart, on listening to one’s “inner voice” or “inner sentiment.”16 Religious understanding, Rousseau insisted, must be personal (much the same as any other pathway to truth, in his view). It requires an initial openness, a willingness to listen: “Begin by putting your conscience in a condition where it wishes to be enlightened,” the vicar counsels in the “Profession.” Next, one must personalize God’s message: “Be sincere with yourself. Make your own those of my sentiments which have persuaded you. Reject the rest.”17 God’s goodness, insofar as it is accessible to human beings, is universally accessible, without recourse to anything other than our own faculties. It has nothing whatsoever to do with “particular dogmas,” which add “absurd contradictions”: Has God not told everything to our eyes, to our conscience, to our judgment? What more will men tell us? Their revelations have only the effect of degrading God by giving Him human passions.18

Our knowledge is limited by our faculties and enabled by them; we must, therefore, trust only those insights that we can validate through them. Knowledge must be personal; it must be one’s own, which means that, epistemologically, truth must be equally available to all: All the theology that I can acquire on my own from the inspection of the universe and by the good use of my faculties is limited to what I have explained to you previously. To know more, one must have recourse to extraordinary means. These means could not be the authority of men; for since no man belongs to a different species from me, all that a man knows naturally I, too, can know, and another man can be mistaken as well as I. When I believe what he says, it is not because he says it, but because he proves it. Therefore, the testimony of men is, at bottom, only that of my own reason and adds nothing to the natural means God gave me for knowing the truth.19


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The vicar could not have been suggesting by this that no person can have an extraordinary understanding of God. Rousseau’s writings clearly indicate the opposite. The vicar’s meaning must be, rather, that this truth is not of the kind that can be taken on the authority of others. This kind of truth must be personally discovered through one’s “own reason.” Those who help us grasp theological principles do so not by virtue of their unique access to the Divine, but rather by making plain something that we too could have come to understand independently. There exist no “extraordinary means,” beyond autonomous reflection, by which we can commune with the Divine. Some will listen more closely to the voice of God, while others will be unable to escape the influence of amour propre, but no one will grasp the truth by submitting to external authority. Rousseau’s understanding of the Divine makes it accessible to all those willing to listen, though it speaks to each person differently. God, Rousseau wrote, is “sole master of changing my heart and my reason.” We are to rely on our inner voice, which is also God’s voice, in order to grasp the truth.20 It can never be just, therefore, for anyone, priests or otherwise, to assert themselves as “arbiters of my belief.”21 God has given us the Scripture and reason so that we can arrive at our own understanding of Divine wisdom. Rousseau distinguished this independence of mind from that of “nominal Christians,” who are “always ready to believe what must be believed or say what must be said for their interest or repose.”22 Rousseau, it seems, was concerned more for the pathway one takes to God than for the interpretation one assigns to His teaching. The good Christian is the honest Christian, who allows the Bible to speak to her by first personalizing and then internalizing its message. As we would expect, in Rousseau’s treatise on education he leaves his pupil’s choice of religion to the pupil himself: To what sect shall we join the man of nature? The answer is quite simple, it seems to me. We shall join him to neither this one nor that one, but we shall put him in a position to choose the one to which the best use of his reason ought to lead him.23

Which specific “sect” one chooses is almost irrelevant; that one chooses it is essential. Immediacy Rousseau’s great burst of philosophical and literary activity was inspired by the sight of a sign, posted on the road connecting Paris and Vincennes,

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in 1749. Seeing those words, arranged as they were, in the form that they were, produced a reaction in Rousseau that propelled him into a literary career. “Has the rise of the arts and sciences contributed to the purification of morals?” It is significant that the rationale for this personal and intellectual transformation was felt or sensed more than reasoned or argued. The illumination on the road to Vincennes – the birth of Rousseau as we know him – embodies, in a single instance, the whole of Rousseau’s phil osophy of truth. In the illumination, truth was felt simply, immediately, and personally.24 Whether Rousseau called himself a Protestant or a Catholic, he was always loyal to the belief that the Divine presence is felt immediately when it is experienced directly, without the mediation of doctrine or priests. Revelation makes itself known through an “inner sentiment.” Even if born on a desert island, never having seen another human being, the vicar tells us that he could learn of God by making use of his Godgiven faculties, which require no intermediary.25 By contrast, the Bible itself, which Rousseau called “the most sublime of all the books,”26 may have to be transgressed in cases where a literal reading would yield an idea of God “unworthy of Him.”27 The Bible, however great, is nevertheless an intermediary between believers and God: if the Scripture itself gave us some idea of God unworthy of Him, we would have to reject it on that point … For, of whatever authenticity the Sacred text may be, it is still more believable that the Bible was altered than that God is unjust or malevolent.28

Though Rousseau frequently counseled his readers to consult the Bible, he made clear that it would be “better yet” to “leave all the books, return to yourself and listen to the inner voice that speaks to all hearts.”29 The path to God goes through Scripture, but not only through Scripture; the Bible contains God’s wisdom, but it does not have a monopoly on it. There is a totally unmediated path to God, available to those able to strip away the impediments to what Rousseau called the “sentiment of existence.” Simplicity Among the many thoughts that ran through Rousseau’s mind on the road to Vincennes was the realization that the “purification of morals” could never be the result of sophistication. “Morality,” Rousseau wrote in his response to the Dijon Academy’s question, is a “sublime science of simple souls.”30 Upon seeing the question, Rousseau realized not only that he was


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opposed to sophistication but that sophistication was itself responsible for the corruption of modern Europe. Sophistication was more than just a symptom of moral corruption; it was also a cause. Predictably, when his thoughts turned toward religion, he emphasized “duty over dogma,” “good works” over “articles of faith,” and “acts of virtue” over “formulas of belief.”31 Rousseau was interpreting or, perhaps, reinterpreting Christianity so as to make it simply another version of the “sublime science of simple souls.” Fastidious readers will want to know how we are to distinguish between those principles that are essential and those that are dogmatic or merely ceremonial. These arguments can never be definitively settled. Rousseau hoped instead to avoid them by reducing the requirements of faith to a few basic, universal principles. Rousseau believed that by approaching religious questions through an ecumenical lens, adherents of different sects would at least have a chance of finding common ground.32 Religious communion remains a possibility, Rousseau believed, because all existing religions are manifestations of a single, essential religion. Rousseau called this religion the religion naturelle (natural religion), and believed that it contained “nothing … but the elements of every religion.”33 If human beings had listened to their hearts, Rousseau’s vicar insists, there would have been nothing to divide them, and the various sects and denomin ations would never have emerged.34 In the “Letters Written from the Mountain,” Rousseau became very specific about what he considered to be the core religious prin ciples: “serve God, love one’s neighbor, obey the law,” and, Rousseau added, “all good Religion” consists in this alone.35 This is the “trunk” spoken of in the “Profession” and then again in the “Letters Written from the Mountain”: “once everything is shaken, one ought to preserve the trunk at the expense of the branches.”36 Rousseau associated this “trunk” with those principles available by reason as well as faith, and associated the branches with amour propre. His was a doctrine of practice as opposed to belief, an injunction to moral conduct as opposed to scriptural fidelity. “What is essential in Religion consists in practice,” Rousseau wrote to Beaumont.37 This is already highly ecumenical, but Rousseau went further, specifying that the “practice” he had in mind was very basic, even to the point that one ignorant of God’s teaching could receive salvation. One must only “be a good man, merciful, humane, and charitable.”38 It is to severely understate his position to say that Rousseau put works above faith. He referred to “a thousand bizarre creeds prescribed by men and rejected by reason,” and claimed further that he would be willing to face

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his judgment day without belief but having worked to do the good God wills.39 Rousseau was certain, not just that one should follow one’s heart rather than ritual, but also that God wants us to reason in this way. Utility Rousseau judged all things by their utility, by how they “pertain to the happiness of mankind,” and religion was no exception.40 The only truths worth pursuing, the only truths that can justifiably be called “truths” at all, are those that contribute to justice and happiness. Correspondingly, Rousseau introduced many of his works with an appeal to their utility. The “Profession” was the “most useful writing of the century,” because in it, Rousseau believed, he had reconciled the demands of religion with the demands of politics.41 In the text, the vicar maintains that the path to God is expansive and can only be personally navigated. He argues, in other words, that the nature of Divine wisdom necessitates a policy of religious toleration. Rousseau’s rationale for tolerance as public policy was based not on a doctrine of inalienable rights, but rather on theology and political utility. The primacy of the individual’s conscience is to be respected because, as a matter of theology, religious communion requires it, and because, as a matter of political utility, it is necessary for communion: intolerance is the “insurmountable barrier that separates us from the Catholics.”42 Insofar as is politically feasible, each person should be free to cultivate her own, personally functional relationship with the Divine. There is one, and only one, justification for restricting what should otherwise be the “most perfect liberty.”43 This occurs only when one’s personal religious practices (not beliefs) threaten the unity of the body politic. As many critics have pointed out, this exception, however circumscribed, has the potential to upset the entire regime of toleration, to act as a wedge through which all manner of coercion might be justified. Many readers have exploited this point in order to depict Rousseau as an enemy of personal liberty.44 In so doing, they have attended insufficiently to Rousseau’s insistence that an authentic communion can only result from the voluntary association of otherwise free agents. For Rousseau, the religious question was less about how to reconcile personal liberty and civic unity than it was about the threat posed to both personal liberty and civic unity by traditional Christianity. His writings on religion were primarily an attempt to restore religious agency to individual believers, because he believed both that any authentic religious


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experience would be personal, and that civic unity could only be fostered in a climate of religious toleration. Diversity is to be respected, according to Rousseau, not as intrinsically valuable, but as a prerequisite to unity: “Let us unite in the love of our common master in the practice of the virtues he prescribes to us. That is what makes the true Christian.”45 To love God is to love peace, and to love peace is to be tolerant. It is a mistake to conceive of the tension between religion and politics as zero-sum – to presuppose, in other words, that the more religion predominates in a society, the more personal liberty will be undermined. Rousseau argued that religion was indispensable, not only for cultivating political unity, but also for cultivating the spirit of tolerance that he believed to be a prerequisite to political unity. Political unity is facilitated less by establishing a particular religious doctrine than it is by broadening principles of faith to include anyone “of good faith who reasons.” This, Rousseau writes, is the “true spirit of the Gospel: for in every Nation, the one who fears him and devotes himself to justice is pleasing to him.”46 Rous s e au ’s r e v i s e d C h r i s t i a n i t y a n d t h e r eligion ci v ile

A variety of questions, both theological and political, emerge from Rousseau’s reconstructed principles of faith. Most obvious, perhaps, is the question of Rousseau’s status as a Christian, a subject that is beyond the scope of this paper but has been addressed compellingly elsewhere.47 With respect to the problem of freedom, the most significant question is whether Rousseau’s insistence on the primacy of individual conscience can be reconciled with his endorsement of an exclusive civil religion in Book iv of the Social Contract. This question has been the subject of much discussion in Rousseau scholarship, with interpreters almost always finding against Rousseau. For example, Pierre-Maurice Masson and Yves Touchefeu, authors of the two great works on Rousseau’s religious thought, for all of their differences, agree that Rousseau failed in this regard, that his attempts to reconcile Christianity and citizenship did not succeed. They find in Rousseau’s writings on religion a defense of the individual’s freedom of conscience, but they argue that this principle cannot be reconciled with the religion civile (civil religion) as defended in the Social Contract. Touchefeu writes: In an effort to reconcile these two demands, he only succeeded in revealing a new fissure at the very center of religion. He demonstrated what separated the particular religion of the city and the universal religion of the Bible.48

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In trying to reconcile civic and religious obligations, Touchefeu argues, Rousseau succeeded only in further dramatizing their irreconcilability. Paul de Man has likewise made much of the theoretical “gap” or “conflict between the theophany of the ‘Profession’ and the political writings.”49 This “gap” or “fissure” might be reconsidered in light of the argument presented in this chapter. While there is undoubtedly a tension between Rousseau’s theology and his political theory, our discussion suggests that this tension is more nuanced than Rousseau’s critics have argued. As we have already seen, there is an intimate connection between what Touchefeu refers to as the “particular religion of the city” and the “universal religion of the Bible” – so much so that the latter can be justifiably described as a precondition of the former. While not sufficient for it, an ecumenical reading of Scripture, was, in Rousseau’s view, necessary for civic unity. Rather than erode respect for individual conscience, Rousseau believed that his proposed civic faith would strengthen it. This is because, as we have seen, Rousseau’s insistence on tolerance as a requirement of the civil religion was not simply pragmatic; it was a principled obligation of all believers. Civil religion is not an unreconstructed revival of the ancient “particular religion of the city,” but rather an attempt to synthesize the particularity of antiquity and the universality of Christianity. Civil religion, Rousseau writes, will include the core principles of Christianity but must be broader than Christianity, encompassing “all fundamental dogmas of every good religion.”50 This broad foundation then becomes the basis for public policy which should be “exclusive,” taking advantage of the ecumenical canvas of religion naturelle (natural religion) to carve out a strong social bond. Rousseau’s strategy incorporates both generality and particularity, by assigning each to a different sphere: generality to matters of religious doctrine and particularity with respect to the “sanctity of the social contract and the laws.”51 This accommodation is necessary because the sanctification of the laws is possible only in a context of respect for the sanctity of individual conscience in spiritual matters. Civil religion must therefore practice generality with respect to theology, so that it can achieve particularity with respect to a civic identity. All of this points toward a reconciliation of the demands of politics with the demands of faith, which Rousseau believed he had achieved in the vicar’s “Profession” and in Book iv of the Social Contract.52 In Rousseau’s view, the vicar’s distillation of the fundamental principles of faith both captured the essence of Christianity and provided a foundation upon which any civil religion may build. By de-emphasizing religious doctrine


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and emphasizing personal piety, Rousseau argued that societies could tame the inclination toward religious persecution and energize believers with respect to the virtue most essential to republican politics: love of one’s fellow citizens. Religion, as Rousseau describes it, encourages tolerance and an openness to mystery, as well as extending an invitation to “love one another without distinction and to regard one another as brothers.”53 It constitutes a dramatic improvement over the skeptical alternatives, with respect not only to civic unity, but to personal liberty as well.54 This reading of Rousseau’s writings on religion mitigates the tension between the personal theology of the “Profession” and the civil religion of the Social Contract, but, I should note in closing, it does not eliminate it. As stated above, an ecumenical reading of Scripture, while necessary to civic unity, is not sufficient. It may even be the case that, having emphasized the generality of God’s will, societies will find it difficult to unite citizens around a particularized civic faith. Our reading of Rousseau’s reconstructed Christianity does not, therefore, eliminate the tension between Rousseau’s religious and political thought. However, it does reframe that tension. It allows us to move away from a zero-sum conversation, in which the particularity of civil religion obviates the ostensible commitment to personal liberty in the bulk of Rousseau’s writings on religion, to a more nuanced discussion of how or whether a policy of religious toleration might be fused with the sanctification of the social contract and the laws. Rousseau’s criticism and reconstruction of Christianity was an attempt to define the “true Christian” as one who subordinates all matters of doctrine to the imperative to “unite in the love of our common master.” In Rousseau’s civil religion, there is only one proscription: intolerance.55 As we have seen here, this was more than a piece of polit ical pragmatism; it was also a reflection of Rousseau’s deepest convictions about the nature of Divine wisdom. No t e s 1 Most of the literature on Rousseau’s religious thought is in French. There are two comprehensive treatments of Rousseau’s religious thought: P. M. Masson, La Religion de J.-J. Rousseau, 3 vols. (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1961); and Y. Touchefeu, L’Antiquité et le christianisme dans la pensée de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999). Other important contributions have been made by H. Gouhier, Les Méditations métaphysiques de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2nd edn. (Paris: Vrin, 1984); P. Burgelin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la religion de Genève (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1962); A. Ravier, “Le Dieu de

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Rousseau et le christianisme,” Archives de philosophie, 41 (1978), pp. 353–434; and R. Derathé, in both Le Rationalisme de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948), ch. 4, and “Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le christianisme,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 53 (1948), pp. 379–414. Ronald Grimsley stands alone among Anglophone writers, with respect to his interest in Rousseau’s religious thought. In addition to an edited volume of Rousseau’s writings on religion, Religious Writings of Rousseau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), he wrote a monograph on Rousseau’s religious writings, Rousseau and the Religious Quest (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968). Judith Shklar, Timothy O’Hagan, and Arthur Melzer have also approached Rousseau from a primarily theo logical perspective, though in much less detail: J. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 113–25; T. O’Hagan, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 1999), ch. 11 and 12; A. Melzer, “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity,” American Political Science Review, 90 (1996), pp. 344–60. Also noteworthy is Patrick Riley’s The General Will before Rousseau (Princeton University Press, 1986), which explores the theological origins of Rousseau’s central political concept. 2 J.-J. Rousseau, “Social Contract,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly 12 vols. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), vol. iv, pp. 216–24; Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, pp. 460–9. 3 There is disagreement over how much of the “Profession” is a reflection of Rousseau’s own views. Though disparities can be identified, the fundamental claims of the “Profession” can be said to be consistent with Rousseau’s own views: his critique of materialism and of philosophical systems; his emphasis of feeling over reason, and on autonomy, simplicity, immediacy, and utility. 4 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. by A. Bloom (New York, Basic Books, 1979), p. 292; Emile, ou de l’ éducation, OC, vol. iv, p. 603. These words are repeated almost verbatim in Julie, ou, la nouvelle Héloïse, OC, vol. ii, p. 683; Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 561. 5 2 Corinthians 3:17: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” For Rousseau, freedom lies neither in surrender to this spirit nor in the absence of constraints, but rather in individual agency: “It is not so much understanding which constitutes the distinction of man among the animals, as it is his being a free agent. Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impetus, but he realizes that he is free to acquiesce or to resist; and it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul is shown.” Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 26; OC, vol. iii, p. 141. 6 Rousseau, “Social Contract,” in Collected Writings, vol. iv, p. 142; Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, p. 365. 7 “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 245. In the “Letter


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to Beaumont,” Rousseau described original goodness as his “fundamental principle.” Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 28; OC, vol. iv, p. 935. 8 Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by R. Leigh, 52 vols. (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1965–1971; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1971–1998), vol. xii, letter 2108. 9 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 47; OC, vol. iv, p. 960. 10 M. Robinson, “Hallowed Be Your Name,” Harper’s Magazine, 313 (2006), p. 25. 11 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 49; OC, vol. iv, p. 963. Later in the letter, he cites Augustine: “Divine truth is neither mine nor yours.” Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 53; OC, vol. iv, p. 967. 12 “I am indignant that the faith of everyone is not in the most perfect liberty, and that man dares control the interior of consciences where he is unable to penetrate.” Rousseau, “Letter to Voltaire,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 119; OC, vol. iv, p. 1072. 13 “Most of our ills are our own work, and … we would have avoided almost all of them by preserving the simple, uniform, and solitary way of life prescribed to us by nature.” Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 23; OC, vol. iii, p. 138. 14 “Who are we,” Saint Preux asks in La Nouvelle Héloïse, “to try to oblige God to perform a miracle?” Rousseau, “Julie or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. iv, p. 563; OC, vol. ii, p. 685. See also, Emile or On Education, pp. 293–4; OC, vol. iv, p. 605. 15 Rousseau, Emile, p. 295; OC, vol. iv, p. 607. 16 “In general, any party man, by that alone an enemy of the truth, will always hate J. J.” Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 237; OC, vol. i, p. 965. 17 Rousseau, Emile, pp. 310–11; OC, vol. iv, p. 630. 18 Rousseau, Emile, p. 295; OC, vol. iv, p. 607. 19 Rousseau, Emile, p. 297, OC, vol. iv, p. 610. 20 Rousseau described conscience as a “divine instinct.” Emile, p. 290; OC, vol. iv, pp. 600–1. 21 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 48; OC, vol. iv, p. 961. 22 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 48; OC, vol. iv, p. 962. 23 Rousseau, Emile, p. 260; OC, vol. iv, p. 558. 24 Was the revelation on the road to Vincennes a religious revelation? Rousseau seems to have interpreted it in that way, describing it as an “inspiration” in a letter to Malesherbes. Correspondance complète, vol. x, letter 1633. 25 Rousseau, Emile, p. 307; OC, vol. iv, p. 625. 26 Rousseau, Correspondance complète, vol. v, letter 634; see also “Observations,” in Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 47; OC, vol. iii, pp. 48–9. 27 Rousseau, “Letter to d’Alembert,” in Collected Writings, vol. x, p. 259; OC, vol. v, p. 12.

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28 Rousseau, “Letter to d’Alembert,” in Collected Writings, vol. x, p. 259; OC, vol. v, p. 12. In Julie, Saint Preux makes the same argument. Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 562; OC, vol. ii, p. 684. 29 Rousseau, “Letters on Virtue and Happiness,” in Œuvres et correspondance inédites de J.-J. Rousseau, ed. by M. G. Streckeisen-Moultou (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1861) p. 133. 30 Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 22; OC, vol. iii, p. 30. 31 Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 47; OC, vol. iv, p. 960. 32 “In agreement with them about the principles of duty, I do not argue about the rest, which seems to me to be of very little importance.” Rousseau, Correspondance complète, vol. xix, letter 3166. See also “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 506; OC, vol. i, p. 605. 33 Rousseau, Emile, p. 296; OC, vol. iv, p. 609. 34 Rousseau, Emile, p. 295; OC, vol. iv, p. 608. 35 Rousseau, “Letters Written from the Mountain,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 227; OC, vol. iii, p. 802. 36 Rousseau, Emile, p. 310; OC, vol. iv, p. 630 and “Letters Written from the Mountain,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 227; OC, vol. iii, p. 802. 37 Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 48; OC, vol. iv, p. 962. 38 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 48; OC, vol. iv, p. 962. 39 Rousseau, “Letter to Voltaire on Providence,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 119; OC, vol. iv, p. 1073. 40 Rousseau, “Discourse,” in Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 3; OC, vol. iii, p. 3. At the outset of his literary career, Rousseau committed himself to the pursuit of these truths. Later, in the “Letter to d’Alembert,” he adopted as his personal motto Juvenal’s imperative to “consecrate one’s life to truth” (“vitam impendere vero”). 41 Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, pp. 46–7; OC, vol. iv, p. 960. Rousseau used almost identical language in characterizing the Social Contract. Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 340; OC, vol. i, p. 405. 42 Rousseau, “Letters Written from the Mountain,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 157; OC, vol. iii, p. 716. 43 Rousseau, “Letter to Voltaire,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 119; OC, vol. iv, p. 1072. 44 See, for example, R. I. Boss, “Rousseau’s Civil Religion and the Meaning of Belief: An Answer to Bayle’s Paradox,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 84 (1971), pp. 123–93; A. Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934); L. G. Crocker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), vol. ii; and S. Johnston, Encountering Tragedy: Rousseau and the Project of Democratic Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 45 Rousseau, “Letters Written from the Mountain,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 144; OC, vol. iii, p. 700.


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46 Rousseau, “Letters Written from the Mountain,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 147; OC, vol. iii, p. 704. 47 Rousseau characterized his theology as “theism or natural religion,” which Christians tend to “confound with atheism.” Emile, p. 294; OC, vol. iv, p. 606. As to those charges of heresy leveled by the priests, Rousseau responded by exalting Christianity as a “better explanation” of his religion naturelle. Correspondance complète, vol. xiv, letter 2411. However, as Robert Derathé has documented, many of Rousseau’s contemporaries felt that his worldview placed too much value on this life and not enough on the next for it to qualify as Christian. “Rousseau et le christianisme,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 53 (1948), pp. 406, 408. André Ravier puts it this way: “In this religion without revelation and without grace, in this Gospel without mysteries and without miracles, in this Christ w ithout incarnation or redemption, could one recognize ‘the doctrine of the Gospel?’” “Le Dieu de Rousseau,” Archives de philosophie, 41 (1978), p. 434. 48 Touchefeu, L’Antiquité et le christianisme, p. 3. See also Masson, La Religion de J.-J. Rousseau, vol. ii, p. 204. 49 P. de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 222–3. 50 Rousseau, “Letters Written from the Mountain,” in Collected Writings, vol. ix, p. 148; OC, vol. iii, p. 705. 51 Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. iv, p. 223; OC, vol. iii, p. 468. I use the terms “particularity” and “generality” here in a sense that may appear to be at odds with the most fundamental principle of Rousseau’s political theory – that the “general will” is the basis for political legitimacy. It is important to note that Rousseau’s general will has an element of exclusivity to it. It is general with respect to citizens’ shared interests but particular with respect to foreigners. As Patrick Riley has put it, “The générale must be (somewhat) particulière.” Riley, “Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,” in Patrick Riley ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 90. The supremacy of the general will depends upon an element of particularity with respect to the sanctification of the civil laws. My argument is that this element of particularity cannot be rendered consistent with the requirement of freedom unless there is a concomitant commitment to generality with respect to theological questions. 52 In a variant to the first of the “Letters Written from the Mountain,” Rousseau went so far as to write, “This civil religion … is precisely that of the priest of Savoy.” OC, vol. iii, p. 1593. 53 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 310; OC, vol. iv, p. 629. 54 Too often, in discussions of religion and politics, religion is considered in contrast to the phantasm of a perfectly tolerant tabula rasa, rather than the likely alternatives. Rousseau’s theology was driven as much by the deficiencies of secular worldviews as it was by an affirmation of religious principles

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themselves. While Rousseau was critical of religion, he judged it superior to the available alternatives, with respect to both civic unity and political toleration. In Rousseau’s view, atheists and philosophers had done as much to undermine tolerance as had their clerical adversaries: “Their apparent skepticism is a hundred times more assertive and more dogmatic than the decided tone of their adversaries.” Emile or On Education, p. 312; OC, vol. iv, p. 632. 55 Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. iv, p. 223; OC, vol. i, pp. 468–9.

Ch apter 9

The constraints of liberty at the scene of instruction Diane Berrett Brown

The wise man knows how to stay in his place; but the child, who does not know his place, would not be able to keep to it. Among us he is given a thousand exits by which to leave it. It is for those who govern him to keep him in his place, and this is not an easy task. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education 1

What did Rousseau see without seeing it, what did he know without being able to express it, what could he not know from within the assumptions he was making? Irene E. Harvey, Labyrinths of Exemplarity2

Emile, ou de l’ éducation (1762) constructs a singular scene of instruction where a curious mix of artifice and nature, liberty and confinement, dissimulation and transparency, creates the conditions for the elaborate project that is the education of Rousseau’s fictional student, Emile. The conceit of Emile’s education is that there is no space that is not pedagogical. The whole of his existence is a heuristic stage, with its boundaries drawn and enforced by his gouverneur, Jean-Jacques, who is at once Emile’s fictional tutor and also the self-proclaimed “visionary on education” who authors the text for the benefit of other would-be educators.3 Addressing a tutor’s responsibility to monitor the scene of instruction with vigilance, Jean-Jacques compares Emile to a sleepwalker blissfully ambling along the edge of a cliff. If the sleepwalker were to awaken suddenly, we are told, he would surely fall: As a somnambulist, wandering during his slumber, sleepwalks on the brink of a precipice into which he would fall if he were suddenly awakened, so my Emile, in the slumber of ignorance, escapes perils that he does not perceive. If I awaken him with a start, he is lost.4

Emile’s ignorance of the invisible hand guiding his every move is likened to sleep: in a state of ignorance, he can wander in safety, unaware of the dangerous precipices that surround him. In this analogy, it is not the cliff per se that threatens the sleepwalker; rather, the danger lies in the full 159

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consciousness that would result from awakening suddenly. Jean-Jacques intends to reveal the dangerous pitfalls Emile avoided while he was “asleep.” In his educational trajectory, Emile will initially be kept away from danger and later shown the perils he has avoided: “Let us first try to get him away from the precipice; and then we shall awaken him in order to show it to him from farther off.”5 The second step, that of full cognizance, is promised in theory, but never fully realized in Emile. The educational practice of continually allowing Emile the protected status of sleepwalker eventually makes it more and more risky for him to wake up. Emile’s rude awakening will not, however, take place until much later than planned, in a textual space outside of Emile: the unfinished sequel to Emile in which Emile will finally confront the jarring reality of unmonitored space. In many ways, then, Emile creates conditions of instruction that center on the notion of the child experiencing a feeling of freedom. He will be told he is free, without being shown the ties that bind him; he will be monitored, but will be unaware of much of the surveillance. Emile’s tutor, in his role as narrator of Emile, is initially straightforward with his readers about his manipulation of Emile’s physical world. What he hides from Emile he shares with his readers as instructional strategies that maintain the appearance of autonomy in a setting that is isolated from society. Emile’s world is artificial and contrived precisely because it is designed as a corrective to all that Rousseau deems ruinous in contemporary society. Because a child raised in civil society will take on weakness, chains, and attachments which could all be avoided in a different context, Rousseau embarks on a singular educational project set outside of the strictures of society yet intended to allow its subject eventually to participate in the public sphere. Rousseau’s writings on education are marked by a tension around the question of liberty. The Rousseau who elsewhere argues that institutions corrupt and enslave must modulate his views of liberty when it comes to children, who, by nature, are dependent on others. In the Social Contract, for example, a child submits to paternal authority for only so long as he needs protection. Once the need for parental protection is obviated, the child will be emancipated and any continued familial relationship will be voluntary.6 In Emile, the project extends educational authority well beyond the scope of self-preservation established in the Social Contract. In devising an individual education that avoids the corrupting influence of institutions, Rousseau nonetheless deploys a rhetoric of liberty; his fictional tutor presides over a sphere where the child will experience submission to authority, but always in the guise of liberty. The following

The constraints of liberty at the scene of instruction

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study of the problematics of educational liberty comprises three parts. First, I will show how liberty, for Emile, is an artificial construct requiring the vigilant management of space and events by the gouverneur. Second, I will examine the constricted flow of knowledge within pedagogical space, and the consequences of Emile’s exclusion from the most popular book of his day, Les Aventures de Télémaque. Finally, I will read Emile’s unfinished sequel, Emile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires, as a study in the potential ramifications of pedagogical artifice. Les Solitaires gives embodiment to the fissures in the edifice of Emile’s education, illustrating the collapse of a carefully crafted education once pedagogical space ceases to be monitored. L i be r t y a n d e duc at ion Theories of liberty often consider the relationship between the indi vidual and a collective, a central concern being the uniting of the individual with other people. This association leads to necessary negotiations between individual autonomy and the desires of the group. The conflicts that arise when individuals form a collective are at the heart of the Social Contract: the balancing act of the general will calls for a legislator, the rare genius who presides over laws, not men, and whose magnanimous spirit brings sound knowledge and understanding to the people.7 Rousseau’s pedagogical sphere fleshes out an analogous individual of rare genius: the gouverneur. However, the particularized temporality of Emile’s education illustrates the difficulties associated with even a fictional rendering of such a benevolent authority figure. While the need to negotiate the competing demands of the general will is less apparent in the pedagogical contract (the education of Emile requires one man to forge a developmental space for just one boy), the problematics of autonomy and authority are nevertheless constantly at play in the scene of instruction. More importantly, in Emile’s case, they are foregrounded as soon as he attempts to exit the instructional sphere. The one-on-one pedagogical context – as unten able a state as the Rousseauian state of nature – is, by design, an uneven social contract. In the tutor–student relationship, it is at times unclear whose will might be abdicated to a common good. Is Emile enslaved to the tutor’s domineering, if benevolent, plan and spatial manipulation? Or is the tutor bound by the same societal strictures from which he seeks to insulate his student? Emile’s childhood establishes the illusion of freedom as an appropriate substitute for actual free will. If Emile believes himself free and makes decisions in accordance with what appears to be absolute

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freedom, is he, perhaps, as free as one could hope to be? If Emile does not see the constraints on his body and intellect as limiting, then are we, perhaps, to see him as free? In Isaiah Berlin’s explanation of the coincidence of liberty and authority in Rousseau, chains cease to be unnatural restraints when they signal the collective rules one has agreed to abide by. If the chains are freely chosen, they are marks not of enslavement but of free will.8 Following Berlin’s reading, we might interpret Emile as the systematic process by which an individual’s will is subordinated to what appears to be a greater good: the meticulous education of one boy. At times in the text, the rhetoric of liberty persuades us to turn a blind eye to the ruse and constraints employed in the service of a greater good. If the narrator repeatedly tells us that Emile will be free, shouldn’t we believe him? Emile vacillates between theory and practice, between a narrator who provides the reader with a transparent view of his methods, and a narrator-turned-character who cannot seem to relinquish control, even when his student is married and expecting a child. The wildly divergent nature of Emile’s critics and readers is a testament to the “instability” (or indeterminacy) of the text, to its tendency to turn back on itself, to proclaim one thing and then enact its opposite. Textual evidence points ultimately to an education that is particular and experimental, not exemplary. Emile is not Everyman, or even Everyboy, and Rousseau’s so-called educational plan is not a plan at all, but a compelling study in the seductions of pedagogical authority. It is a fictional rendering of the impossibility of moving from an artificial sphere to civil society. In short, it warns of the dangers of calling chains “freedom.” While many readers see Emile as a prescriptive treatise on education, I believe it is better read as a cautionary tale that shows how constrained liberty is, at best, an oxymoron. The well-known episode of the “races for cakes” typifies the tutor’s tendency to provide the guise of freedom in a space that is rigidly engineered. We are told that Emile and his tutor habitually take an afternoon walk and enjoy two cakes along the way – one for each of them. One day, Jean-Jacques brings along a third cake to be used as a prop in what turns out to be an elaborately staged scenario. He sets the cake on a rock and summons local boys to race for it, which piques Emile’s interest in both winning a cake and learning to race. Sometimes the tutor brings several cakes to entice more runners or varies the individual routes, so the boys cannot trip each other or kick rocks onto the path. When Emile proclaims himself ready to enter the race, Jean-Jacques manipulates the individual routes to ensure the outcome. In his dual role as tutor and


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narrator, he confides to the reader that, no matter how the subsequent races might appear, he was always able to control the result. Intimately familiar with his student, he knew that Emile would invariably opt for the most scenic route; he thus planned his strategy accordingly, mapping the terrain and scripting how his players inhabited the space: Without bothering about the distance, he always preferred the path that looked good; so that, easily foreseeing his choice I was practically the master of making him lose or win the cake at will.9

Eventually, Emile learns the lesson intended by the tutor: although the playing field is not level, Emile is free to canvass the terrain to assess the inequality inherent in his surroundings. He can then select the shortest path, even though the tutor knows he will not. In this lesson, the village boys are props in the same way that the cakes, rocks, and paths are props, each existing for Emile’s instruction and overseen by the tutor. In the race for the cakes, the imperative of independence is achieved through a theatrical stage direction. That is, by enlisting appropriate props and bit players and securing the borders of pedagogical space, the teacher, acting as stage manager, can give Emile a sense of freedom, while in fact affording him none. This idea of independence is reinforced through rhetoric which repeatedly tells Emile that he is free, and carefully camouflages any traces of limitations. In this sense, the text betrays the very legacy that it tries to construct. The many instructional anecdotes in Emile – such as the misunderstanding with the gardener Robert about land ownership, or the mountebank’s ducks rigged with magnets – offer the rhetoric of liberty, recounted by an authority figure who preaches liberty and autonomy while simultaneously eliminating the possibility of its realization. Whereas the narrative addressed to future tutors theorizes the virtues of independence, the novelistic parts of Emile portray a figure unwilling to relinquish the authority he has so carefully constructed and camouflaged. The nature of pedagogical authority, of course, shifts over time as Emile matures, but while his actions are less monitored, they are still constrained. When Emile reaches the age of 20, the tutor reflects upon the docility instilled in Emile through the systematic process of constant attachment. As Emile becomes a man, he behaves as if the tutor is present, even when he is not. The narrator explains: It is true that I leave him the appearance of independence, but he was never better subjected to me; for now he is subjected because he wants to be. As long as I was unable to make myself master of his will, I remained master of his person;

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I was never a step away from him. Now I sometimes leave him to himself, because I govern him always.10

This poses a fundamental question about Emile’s liberty and, by extension, the liberty of anyone seeking emancipation from the monitored state that is childhood. When Emile was younger, Jean-Jacques maintained constant physical presence because dominion over the student’s physical self – surroundings, objects, and actions – was more readily assured than control over his will. As Emile matures, he has internalized the will of Jean-Jacques, who can now leave Emile alone because, whether present or absent, he has become a constant governing force. The tutor’s proclaimed confidence in Emile’s submission wavers when it comes to the looming threat of sexual development. So great are the dangers posed by sexual desires, that when warning of what he famously labels the “dangerous supplement,” he advises tutors not to allow any unmonitored space. Not only must the scene of instruction be circumscribed and artificial, but also, within that space, Emile must be guarded by the tutor as sentinel. “Therefore watch the young man carefully … Do not leave him alone, day or night. At the very least, sleep in his room.”11 Sexuality poses two distinct threats to the educational agenda. First, unchecked thoughts and fantasies must be confronted and controlled, which the tutor does by monitoring any private space that might foster corrupting thoughts. Second, and more difficult to manage, sexual feelings in Emile speak to the eventuality of a wife, whose presence, both theoretical and real, will disrupt the most carefully constructed scene of instruction. The final book of Emile, Book v, introduces a woman into the pedagogical equation. As will emerge, her admission into the scene of instruction will lay bare some of the less visible ties that bind Emile to his tutor and foreshadow the improbability of his eventual emancipation. T h e c i rc u l at ion of k now l e d g e : E m i l e a n d T e l e m ac h us The rhythm of Rousseau’s pedagogical couple oscillates between the withholding and revealing of information, according to a carefully devised timetable which he divulges to his reader but not to Emile, who is meant to believe that his education is an organic process in which he enjoys a large measure of independence. Josué Harari labels this process of leading Emile to believe in his own autonomy, a “pedagogy of ruse,” and asserts that “Rousseau’s real pedagogical objective is to take over the child’s imaginary.”12 The taking over of the child’s imaginary is a methodology


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dependent upon the regulation of space along with the people and things allowed access to the scene of instruction. In what follows, I will examine the regulation of knowledge within the pedagogical sphere. Nothing reaches Emile without passing through the teacher’s filter: there is no spare bit of information, no unplanned event. In this way, Emile’s limited access to “outside” knowledge – such as books and history – mirrors his limited mobility. Emile is isolated from books, with the exception of the famous “only book” of his younger years, Robinson Crusoe.13 The narrator initially justifies Robinson Crusoe as required reading because it provides the “most felicitous treatise of natural education.”14 Robinson’s island (or, more precisely, Rousseau’s version of Robinson’s island) is an apt metaphor for the spatial dimensions of Emile’s existence, as it is circumscribed and unhampered by the contamination of outside elements. He may roam anywhere on the “island” that is his scene of instruction, but he is unable to leave or receive anything from any realm beyond the island’s borders. The tutor claims that he wishes Emile to be immersed in thoughts of Robinson, and even to believe that he is Robinson. This reveals more about Rousseau’s methodology of constraint than it does about an ideal of natural education. If Emile truly identifies with Robinson, he may fail to see the most obvious way in which he is nothing like him: Emile is never alone, isolated, or away from the guiding hand of his tutor. Providing Emile with a heroic ideal of a man alone in nature serves to perpetuate the myth of Emile as free agent; it also asserts Jean-Jacques’s own invisibility. This is the story that Emile and the reader are compelled to believe, in spite of repeated reminders that Emile is neither solitary nor independent. If Robinson Crusoe is the one book Emile has read, the other volume that will influence his education (and his miseducation) is one that he has not read: Les Aventures de Télémaque.15 Fénelon’s bestselling pedagogical novel comes into play in the narrative of Emile at the same time that the pedagogical sphere prepares itself for the introduction of a woman for Emile to love and ultimately to marry. This woman, first presented as an abstract concept of ideal womanhood, “Sophie,” eventually appears as a young woman with the same name. Her presence necessitates the rearrangement of pedagogical boundaries from a teacher–student sphere to a domestic sphere composed of an educated citizen and his wife. The pedagogical field is resistant to shifting contours, even as, rhetorically, it appears to make room for Sophie. Sophie’s disruption of the scene of instruction motivates a more subtle control of pedagogical space than did the tutor’s positioning of cakes and designing of footraces.

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The circulation of books that characterized the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters is absent from Emile’s pedagogical sphere. Nonetheless, the tutor, who has to this point eschewed all books beyond Robinson Crusoe, now begins to invoke analogies to Télémaque that exclude Emile, who is hampered by his ignorance of Fénelon’s bestseller and thus unable to recognize the tutor’s allegorical embodiment of the pedagogical couple of Mentor and Telemachus. As the narrative of Emile becomes more and more novelistic in Book v, the tutor as author recedes and Jean-Jacques, the tutor as character, is foregrounded. Consequently, readers may be less aware of the pedagogical tactics than they were earlier in the book’s more treatise-like sections.16 In the chronology of Emile, both Emile and the reader have been prepared at length for the arrival of Emile’s ideal mate. What Emile sees as serendipity – stumbling upon the isolated home of the perfect woman, coincidentally named “Sophie” – the reader knows is a component of the grand plan. Addressing the reader directly, the narrator tips his hand: Nor should you believe that I waited until I gave Emile the responsibility of looking for a wife before I found her. This feigned search is only a pretext for making him learn about women, so he will sense the value of the one who suits him. For a long time Sophie has been found.17

Traveling on foot, Emile and his tutor wander in the countryside until they are directed to a cottage where they might be able to find lodging. Thus Emile and his tutor arrive – supposedly by chance – at Sophie’s home, where they are warmly received, which confuses Emile, who assumes he has entered a house of strangers. He remarks that the unbidden hospitality evokes what it must have been like in what he calls “Homer’s time”: “What! It is as though we were expected! … What attention, what goodness, what foresight! And for unknowns! I believe I am living in Homer’s time.”18 He has been greeted as if he were expected because, as the reader and all the other characters in the scene seem to know, he was expected. It has been raining and the two travelers are soaked, which prompts Sophie’s father to comment that he is reminded of a scene from Les Aventures de Télémaque: “you and your governor have arrived here tired and wet like Telemachus and Mentor on Calypso’s island.”19 With this reference, Sophie’s father evokes not the Odyssey, but Les Aventures de Télémaque.20 Emile, recognizing Calypso from the Odyssey, thinks he understands the reference and responds: “It is true … that we find here the hospitality of Calypso.” The tutor, well aware of which books Emile has and has not read, capitalizes on the intertextual allusion when he


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makes a curious statement equating himself with Fénelon’s divine Mentor while excluding Emile from the conversation: His Mentor adds, “And the charms of Eucharis.” But although Emile knows the Odyssey, he has not read Telemachus. He does not know who Eucharis is. As for the girl, I see her blush up to her eyes, lower them toward her plate, and not dare to murmur.21

The narrator, himself a shifting, composite character, here refers to himself for the first time as “Mentor,” thus voicing the Fénelonian analogy which, to this point, had been implied but never stated.22 Sophie, having just been compared to the nymph Eucharis, recognizes the innuendo and blushes, while Emile, constrained by his own ignorance, is blissfully unaware of the sexually charged nature of the scene. What Sophie, her parents, and the tutor all know is that Fénelon’s Telemachus encounters two very different women: the nubile and dangerous Eucharis, and the virtuous Antiope. The wiles of Eucharis represent such a threat that Mentor pushes Telemachus off a cliff into the ocean to escape her. Later in his travels, Telemachus meets and becomes betrothed to Antiope, whose virtue, devotion, and domestic arts make her the antithesis of Eucharis. It is thus jarring when Emile’s tutor likens Sophie to the woman who ignited sexual passion in Telemachus instead of the woman he eventually marries.23 For the rest of Book v, Les Aventures de Télémaque thus functions as the overdetermined sign of Emile’s ignorance, as the tutor continues allusions to himself as Mentor, Emile as Telemachus, and Sophie as Eucharis. If considered in terms of space and intrusion, the tutor’s quip in this scene offers an unexpected answer to the question implicit in the prepar ations for Emile’s courtship: how will Sophie inhabit the pedagogical space? From the educational rhetoric in the text, one might expect the space of instruction to be dissolved and give way to the domestic sphere: the tutor will exit just as the wife entered the scene. The fiction of Emile and his tutor, however, portrays a different scenario, in which the tutor seems unable to relinquish his role. By deploying Fénelon’s model and defining Sophie in terms of sexuality (Eucharis) instead of domesticity (Antiope), the tutor allows himself to play the same role as Mentor does in Les Aventures de Télémaque. Were he to align Sophie with Antiope, he would, in essence articulate his own obsolescence. If Sophie is defined as Eucharis, the tutor can stand in for Mentor, who in Télémaque saved the young prince from the certain ruin that would have accompanied satisfying his lust for Eucharis. Emile’s tutor has already established himself as

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a regulator of Emile’s sexual impulses: he would not allow the adolescent Emile to give in to the “dangerous supplement” of masturbation. The sexualization of Sophie allows the tutor to regulate the marital sphere by locating it as a component of the pedagogical sphere, rather than its replacement. When it is time for Emile to travel and see the world before marrying, the tutor has Sophie give her copy of Les Aventures de Télémaque to Emile, “in order that he learn to resemble him.”24 The book changes hands, from Sophie to Emile, because it has served its purpose, which is to position Sophie relative not just to Emile, but to the peda gogical couple, Emile and his tutor. Seen in terms of pedagogical space, women, symbolized by Sophie and Eucharis, jeopardize the exclusivity of the scene of instruction, inhabited by the homosocial teacher–student couple. Women, though theoretically necessary, constitute, in practice, an intrusion into the educational process. In matters of love and marriage, the tutor’s role becomes increasingly excruciating to witness: he tells us that Sophie prefers to take his arm over Emile’s, and he waits outside the marriage chamber, ready with advice even in matters of granting and withholding sexual favors. The ending of Emile, with its docile, not-quite-autonomous married couple expecting a child, does not portend the life of liberty described in the text’s more treatise-like sections, but instead points to the continuation of the domestic ménage à trois. The last words of the book are Emile’s, but they are a testament to the tutor’s essential place in their household: “Advise us and govern us. We shall be docile. As long as I live, I shall need you. I need you more than ever now that my functions as a man begin.”25 T h e p o s t-pe dag o g ic a l s ph e r e If the ending casts doubt upon the viability of Emile’s emancipation from his educational apprenticeship, the unfinished sequel to Emile shows how quickly and completely Emile’s education is dismantled once the tutor withdraws. The ending of Emile portends a domestic scene not unlike Emile’s life before Sophie, in which the tutor continues to advise, govern, and manage the setting that best creates docile domesticity. Instead, Emile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires takes a radical turn, removing the tutor as both narrator and companion and offering us Emile’s epistolary account of his post-pedagogical existence. The two letters, addressed to his former tutor, chronicle the stunning degeneration of Emile’s existence. Although never finished (the second letter ends mid-sentence), Les Solitaires provides compelling evidence of the prognosis for Emile and Sophie.26 The factitious


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liberty in Emile crumbles as soon as the invisible hand of the tutor ceases to control the environment. In this way, Les Solitaires imagines a new spatial relationship for Emile, one that is fundamentally concerned with showing the burden of unfettered space. When Emile and Sophie quit the circumscribed pedagogical sphere, their undoing is a matter of course. To return to the sleepwalker analogy, Emile’s sudden separation from his tutor constitutes the jarring, abrupt awakening about which the reader has been cautioned. Without his tutor, Emile experiences an awakening marked by an awful and frenetic turn of events: the death of Sophie’s parents and a child, an unfaithful wife, and the deplorable evils of living in Paris. At the height of his crisis, Emile runs into the city streets on a course he describes as filled with “a thousand twists and turns,”27 trying to enact freedom of motion as he runs aimlessly through the city.28 Even the city cannot contain him, and he eventually ends up on a ship headed for Algeria. In the post-pedagogical world, Emile can run, jump aboard a ship, and move wherever he pleases on land or sea, but he will not find the feeling of liberty he enjoyed in the simulacrum that was his scene of instruction. While some critics have downplayed the importance of this unfinished text, others, such as Thomas Kavanagh, deem it an “essential postscript” to Emile.29 The two letters that comprise Les Solitaires function as a coda that forces us to return to the original text and reconsider its claims and methods. How can one read Emile as an educational plan to be implemented in reality, when the edifice falls apart as soon as the architect walks away? With Les Solitaires, it is as if Rousseau steps back and allows his readers to assess critically the fruits of his educational enterprise. He withdraws his teacherly and narrating self from the text and allows Emile to narrate his own misadventures. The tutor’s physical absence nonetheless acts as a textual presence; the missing tutor is the interlocutor and also, implicitly, the antagonist of the story, as Emile blames his misfortunes on his tutor’s abandonment. The first sentence of Emile’s first letter sets down the three crucial terms of Emile’s prior existence, that is, his life when he was sheltered and guided under the unerring eye of the gouverneur: “J’étois libre, j’étois heureux, ô mon maître!” (I was free, I was happy: oh, my teacher!)”30 Les Solitaires allows us to unravel the tightly woven fabric of these three elements – freedom, happiness, and the tutor – to see that the relationship between happiness and freedom is not causal. That is, Emile’s perceived happiness was not a consequence of his freedom, as one might have expected. Instead, he believed himself to be both free

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and happy because of the unwavering presence of the third element – the tutor, whose pedagogical strategy relied on the appearance of free will. But this strategy succeeded only so long as Emile’s existence was scripted by Jean-Jacques. One function of Les Solitaires, then, is to show the dire consequences of conflating Emile’s experience of liberty with legitimate social autonomy. How did a meticulously constructed education lead so quickly to disaster and wrecked lives? Emile, again, believes it is the tutor’s fault: “If you had not left, I would still be happy.”31 Marie-Hélène Huet shows the grave consequences of the tutor’s withdrawal, which constitute no less than the dismantling of the whole educational project: “the tutor, by the simple act of removing himself from Emile’s domesticity, entirely destroys all the good he had previously done.”32 Certainly, things fall apart quickly as soon as Emile and Sophie are separated from the tutor. We must, however, consider the plausibility of Emile’s insistence that his unhappiness stems from the tutor’s withdrawal. No doubt, the social order created in Emile would have been maintained if the tutor had not left. But would Emile then have been happy? The coda that is Les Solitaires leads us back to Emile, looking for signs that foreshadow what is to come. Such a reading allows us to see that the problem is perhaps not the tutor’s eventual absence, but his hovering, unflinching presence that gave Emile only the appearance of liberty and, hence, only ersatz happiness. Emile’s claim, that he was formerly happy and free, now reads as an ironic nostalgia for the synthetic liberty of his childhood – the only kind of liberty he ever knew. This so-called liberty requires an ignorance of what the tutor calls “precipices,” but what we might more rightly call the “perils of the human condition.” Had it been completed, Les Solitaires might have served as an attempt at the post-pedagogical novel, allowing us to glimpse what happens after the educational novel. If Emile tries to imagine a utopian pedagogical sphere exclusively for the education of one boy, then Les Solitaires represents the dilemma implicit in the creation of any ideal world: can it endure? Will it withstand time and intrusion? As a chronicle of educational emancipation, Les Solitaires is a cautionary tale about the tenuous balance between the rhetoric of freedom and its practical implementation. In Emile, then, the student is told to direct his gaze in all directions; he will observe and learn without noticing the contours of his educational stage. What looks to Emile like a horizon of boundless possibil ities is, in fact, a walled pedagogical city, its artifice revealed when Emile and Sophie are exiled to the world beyond. Behind the façade of childcentered liberty is a gouverneur, Emile’s tutor, whose omnipotence provides


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a seductive model of safety for Emile. The safety it affords, however, does not admit of domestic autonomy for Emile (or for Emile and Sophie) without the tutor as fulcrum. The danger of the benevolent pedagogy of Emile – a system that requires one man’s full attention for two decades – is that its intricate construction resists change; this is a tale that does not want to end because the ending represents such a radical shift in space, temporality, and autonomy. The regulatory educational space inhabited by the pedagogical couple prescribes conditions under which an idealized education becomes possible. Ultimately, the methodology, whatever its intention, is shown to be conceptually flawed in its attempt to establish liberty while offering only its simulacrum. No t e s 1 All quotations from Emile, ou de l’ éducation are from Allan Bloom’s English translation: J.-J. Rousseau, Emile or On Education (New York: Basic Books, 1979), pp. 84–5. 2 I. E. Harvey, Labyrinths of Exemplarity: At the Limits of Deconstruction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), p. ix. 3 The preface to Emile or On Education claims that what will follow is not an educational treatise, but the musings of a visionary on education (p. 34). 4 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, pp. 319–20. 5 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 320. 6 See the Social Contract, Book i, ch. 2, for a discussion of first societies. 7 The characteristics and functions of the legislator are described in the Social Contract, Book ii, ch. 7. 8 I. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, ed. by H. Hardy (Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 43. 9 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 142. 10 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 332. 11 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 333. 12 J. V. Harari, Scenarios of the Imaginary: Theorizing the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 111. 13 Todd Flanders offers convincing arguments as to why Rousseau selected Robinson Crusoe as the foundational work of Emile’s education. He also shows how Rousseau’s revisionist interpretation of Robinson Crusoe has endured. “Rousseau’s Adventure with Robinson Crusoe,” Interpretation, 24 (1997), pp. 313–37. 14 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 184. 15 Published anonymously in 1699 as Suite du quatrième livre de l’Odyssée d’Homère ou les Aventures de Télémaque fils d’Ulysse, this work was the peda gogical fiction of François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon (1651–1715), then royal tutor to the Duc de Bourgogne, son of the Grand Dauphin, and grandson of Louis XIV. Fénelon claimed to have written Télémaque only

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to amuse and instruct the Dauphin, but an opportunistic copyist turned it over to a publisher. It sold 600 copies on the first day and went on to become the bestseller of the century. More than a hundred French editions were published throughout the eighteenth century, along with seventy-five translations in twelve languages. For an English translation, see F. Fénelon, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, ed. and trans. P. Riley (Cambridge University Press, 1994). 16 Julia Douthwaite argues that it is Rousseau’s “tortured attitude toward truth claims” that accounts for the shifting narrative stance found in Emile. By Book iii, Rousseau is already vacillating on the feasibility of the plan being articulated, showing that it may well not have any practical value. The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 107. 17 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 407. 18 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 413. 19 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, pp. 413–14. 20 In the Odyssey, Odysseus lands on Calypso’s island, where he is tempted by Calypso at the same time that Telemachus and Mentor have embarked on their journey to rescue him. In Les Aventures de Télémaque, Fénelon imagines a scene in which Telemachus and Mentor also visit Calypso’s island. In this episode, which is not a part of the Odyssey, they discover Calypso mourning the departure of Ulysses. While stranded on the island, Telemachus is tempted by Calypso’s nymph, Eucharis, who seeks to seduce him by separating him from Mentor. 21 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 414. 22 The protean narrative voice in Emile (shifting from third-person narrator, to Emile’s fictional gouverneur, to a visionary on education addressing his thoughts to a mother) must be taken into account in any interpretation of the work. For studies of the narrative voices in Emile, see C. Cherpack, “Narration and Meaning in Rousseau’s Emile,” French Forum, 13 (1988), pp. 17–30; M. Cisar, “Paradoxes of Plot and Voice in the Emile,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 11 (1987), pp. 12–33; and J. Vanpée, “Rousseau’s Emile ou de l’ éducation: A Resistance to Reading,” Yale French Studies, 77 (1990), pp. 156–76. 23 Critics have offered a range of justifications for this jarring comparison. Susan Moller Okin sees the reference as evidence of the fanciful, illogical nature of Rousseau’s overall project to transform a natural man into a citizen: Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 185. Robert Granderoute believes that Rousseau fused the two women: the meeting of Emile and Sophie recalls Telemachus arriving on Calypso’s island and their separation symbolizes the fact that Telemachus had to leave Antiope: Le Roman pédagogique de Fénelon à Rousseau, 2 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985), vol. ii, p. 1189 n6. Laurence Mall sees the conflation of Antiope and Eucharis as a means of diminishing Fénelon’s Christian severity: Emile ou les figures de la fiction (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002), p. 259. Two studies take up this question in detail: J. Crosthwaite, “Sophie and Les Aventures


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de Télémaque: Amorous Nymphs and Virtuous Wives in Rousseau’s Emile,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1992), pp. 189–201; and D. B. Brown, “Emile’s Missing Text: Les Aventures de Télémaque,” Symposium, 63:1 (2009), pp. 51–71. 24 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 450. 25 Rousseau, Emile or On Education, p. 480. 26 The Pléiade edition of Rousseau’s Œuvres complètes provides complete documentation of the publication history and possible conclusions of Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, pp. cliii–clxviii. Pierre Burgelin details the evidence for two different projected endings to Les Solitaires. Pierre Prévost and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre both report Rousseau’s having recounted the conclusion to Emile’s wanderings. Both endings place Emile on an island and in both cases Sophie reappears. Prévost’s account ends with Sophie and Emile reunited after a sham marriage to another woman, while Bernardin’s version has Emile deciding to “imitate the patriarchs” and take two wives. See also F. Eigeldinger, “Histoire d’une œuvre inachevée: ‘Emile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires’,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 40 (1992), pp. 153–84. 27 Rousseau, Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 893. 28 All translations of Emile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires are the author’s. An English translation by Alice W. Harvey can be found as an appendix to an edited collection of articles on women and liberal democracy: “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and Sophie, or Solitary Beings,” in Finding a New Feminism, ed. by P. G. Jensen (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), pp. 192–236. 29 T. M. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 101. 30 Rousseau, Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 881. 31 Rousseau, Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 884. 32 M.-H. Huet, “Social Entropy,” Yale French Studies, 92 (1997), p. 178.

C h a p t e r 10

“Toutes mes idées sont en images”: Rousseau and the yoke of necessity Marius Hentea

To know Jean-Jacques Rousseau is to take up his barbing challenge: “Judge the pictures of the soul.”1 The difficulty of coming to terms with the most self-baring writer of his time, who saw his life as “a long reverie divided into chapters by my daily promenades,”2 must be the primary starting point for any reflection on Rousseau, “a madman and a genius,” as Éric Weil (among others) has said.3 Rousseau’s writings astound with brilliance and penetrating thought but also confound with obscurity and contradiction: “I relate simply what I thought I felt.”4 But how do we do understand this for a writer who says that “all of my ideas are in images” (“toutes mes idées sont en images”)?5 It may be necessary to find what Rousseau, the writer of metaphors and transcriber of music, was imagining behind his words. I propose here a reading of Rousseau via the joug, the yoke, which is a constant presence in Rousseau’s political, moral, and biographical writings. At the start of Book ii of the Confessions, Rousseau writes that the 16-year-old leaving Geneva could never have known that his life would be lived “under a yoke much harder than any I was able to bear”: this yoke structures a life.6 “I will be free [or] no man will ever have been”7 is perhaps Rousseau’s greatest theme, his constant struggle and preoccupation. Freedom in this world is what he seeks above anything else: freedom from opinion, from prejudice and dishonesty. Freedom is the most human of qualities, greater than reason, but, to merit its name, freedom must be employed for the good. It must tame passions, which overwhelm reason; it must be directed toward the healthy and the beneficent; it must advance the good. The ultimate standard is nature, which can never be wrong, and freedom, not rising above nature, recognizes its fundamental dependence upon it. The human soul is constrained by nature, by être (being). But these are the constraints which one can attach oneself to, the ones which fix the world for the self. The “yoke” imagery provides a structure which Rousseau uses 174

Rousseau and the yoke of necessity

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to emphasize this; in a way, his searching throughout his life is nothing but a search for who he is. Most literally, a yoke is a harness for cattle. Colloquially, we speak of the yoke of a foreign oppressor, and the use of force to expel it (“secouer le joug”). The metaphor also derives meaning in the Christian tradition from the idea of accepting Christ’s yoke (Matthew 11:29–30). For the Romans, the iugum consisted of two upright spears with a third lying transversely upon them, under which vanquished armies passed with the victors looking on. Livy, a writer whom Rousseau knew from his study of Machiavelli’s Discorsi, paints a frightening picture of passing under the yoke, sub iugum mittere: They pictured to their mind’s eye the hostile yoke, the victor’s taunts … and how they must pass unarmed between the ranks of their armed enemies, and then wend their wretched way … As they uttered these complaints, the fateful hour of their humiliation [hora fatalis ignominiae] came … First the consuls, little better than half-naked, were sent under the yoke, then their subordinates were humbled, each in the order of his rank; and then, one after another, the several legions. The enemy under arms stood on either side, reviling them and mocking them … Thus they were sent under the yoke, and, what was almost harder to bear, while their enemies looked on [per hostium oculos].8

Livy mentions the state of the enemy when passing under the yoke: “inermes nudique”; “inermes cum singulis vestimentis”; “nudi”; “prope seminudi”.9 Could Rousseau, a would-be Roman, have stumbled over these words without their having made an impression on his mind? Consider: his being stripped of his sword, like his defeated father; the family descending from the rich Haute-Ville to the plebeian Basse-Ville; the shame and humiliation he dreaded above anything else (“I only saw the horror of being recognized, and me being declared publicly a thief, liar, slanderer”);10 the feeling that his persecutors would “triumph” as he became “the shame and disgrace of the human race”;11 the public opinion which “subjugated even [Jean-Jacques]”;12 the nakedness he dreaded; the hostile stares (“hostium oculos”) which affected him from candy shops in his youth to his last promenades solitaires (“to read in the eyes of the onlookers the unfair judgment they make”);13 the sentiment of his not being worthy of his native city, whose virtues he exulted in his imagin ation even while it burned his books and banished him (“my heart sinks, my hand trembles”)14 – all this can be reconstructively imagined.

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M a r i us H e n t e a

Rousseau constantly describes himself as subjugué, dominated, but the word’s direct meaning is “being under the yoke,” an etymology Rousseau knew (“he allowed himself to be subjugated by them in such a way that he could no longer remove that yoke with impunity”).15 The Roman and Christian elements of the yoke are especially significant. He prided himself on being a citoyen (citizen) in an age where “there are only Europeans”16 and on maintaining, in an age of materialism and doubt, strong religious faith (“I was a believer; I have always been one”).17 The yoke of nature, necessity, is Rousseau’s most trusted measuring rod; the yoke of good laws is what he wants for government; the yoke of Christ is moral salvation. There is also “la vie conjugale,” conjugium (married life). Emile’s greatest test is to find his Sophie to marry; Julie, or The New Heloise, is a novel about marriage first of all, and the possibility of virtue within and outside of marriage. Despite living with Thérèse Levasseur for many years, Rousseau resisted marriage until very late. It is no exaggeration to say that marriage was a constant preoccupation, both personally and for his moral and political thought. Unfortunately, a full treatment of his ideas concerning marriage cannot be undertaken here. I shall instead trace how the yoke is used by Rousseau to describe his writing life: it is the yoke of prejudice that a free writer must combat. Next, I will examine how yoke imagery figures in Rousseau’s discussion of good governance, where it raises the critical question of what type of freedom is possible under civil law. Finally, I aim to show how a different type of yoke, one connected to freedom and necessity, is found under the moral law. W r i t i ng f or t h e pr ej u dic e d Already as a debutant, Rousseau felt that his writings would not be access ible to those under the yoke of opinion and prejudice, the subjugués: At all times there will be men destined to be subjugated by the opinions of their century, their Country, their Society … One must not write for such Readers when one wants to live beyond one’s century.18

Rousseau wants to be judged “at the tribunal of experience and reason.”19 Not finding “Plato and Xenocrates for judges,”20 he claims to write “only for myself.”21 But this would be like the botanical guide to the Île de Saint-Pierre, of no use to anyone (botany as “truth without object or progress”),22 and this Rousseau does not produce.


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Even if the prejudiced public cannot be convinced, and Rousseau’s writing leads only to his being judged falsely, he persists because writing is his means of salvation. Consider the dominant image in the writing of the Confessions: Rousseau hopes that God will judge him when given the Confessions, as if God needed a book in order to judge a man and had, moreover, to wait to receive it from the author’s hand. But that is the point. The porta triumphalis – the mirror of passing under the yoke, a procession for victors, not the vanquished – is recreated, the march to a flourish of trumpets into the bosom of his maker.23 Rousseau’s texts were his weapons and the truth of what he wrote his victory. The tension throughout Rousseau’s life, between writing as salvation and punishment, does not resolve itself easily. One possible solution may come from considering his need to be punished. About Mademoiselle Lambercier, he notes: “To be at the knees of an imperial mistress, to obey her orders, to have to beg for her forgiveness, have been to me the most delicate of pleasures [jouissances].”24 But these pleasures in punishment Rousseau could only admit to in writing, never to friends nor even Thérèse. Despite his assertion that he had the happiest of childhoods, Rousseau cannot distinguish between punishment and being: “I would tell myself: well, what will happen? I will be beaten. Fine, that’s what I was made for.”25 His father always reminded him that he (Jean-Jacques) killed his mother (who died in childbirth), whose virtues were exaggerated along the lines of the romance novels they read through the night. The associ ation of his existence with the most horrific crime leads Rousseau to seek punishment when he is in fact innocent (taking his nameless brother’s punishment) and also to stubbornly proclaim his innocence when all the evidence is against him (as in the case of the comb). Because Rousseau liked being punished by Mademoiselle Lambercier, his uncle Bernard was called in and punished him much more severely than he would have been, had he confessed his guilt. Punished several times and placed in the most awful condition, I remained obstinate [inébranlable]. I would have suffered death rather than give in and I was resolved to do just that. Force had to yield before the diabolical stubbornness [entêtement] of the child, because they had no other word for my persistence. Finally I emerged from this cruel ordeal shattered [en pièces], but triumphant.26

The scene depends upon yoke imagery: the cry of being “triumphant”; the choice of “stubbornness” (“entêtement”) to express his unyielding nature; his self-description as “obstinate” (“inébranlable”); and the boys

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yelling out “Carnifex!” (“Torturers!”)27 The Roman elements reverse the shame of the vanquished: there can be pride in being unjustly punished, and one can use the occasion to flaunt one’s superiority. Like his swordcarrying father, described as “impatient of the yoke and servitude,” he will not suffer an insult.28 By not speaking, he suffers (physically) even more. Yet to speak would be duplicitous and shameful. The lesson learned is that punishment is inseparable from living, and, for the man who makes his life a text, it becomes inseparable from writing. Rousseau says of Jean-Jacques in the Dialogues that the “destiny” of his life is “divided into two parts,” which, Rousseau explains, means: “the time when he published books – marked the death of one and the birth of the other.”29 Birth is always violent for Rousseau: his own birth killed his mother; in Julie, the father beats the heroine (which she accepts and even likes), causing her miscarriage and thus preserving her for Wolmar; and the birth of society is the creation of misery. Rousseau’s birth as a writer could never atone for the man he killed off: I judged that if I wanted to be consistent and to shrug off [secouer] my shoulders the heavy yoke of opinion [le pesant joug de l’opinion], I didn’t have a moment to lose. I suddenly chose my course quite bravely, and I have held to it up to now with a steadfastness that only I can know the price of.30

Rousseau sets out to “fix down” (“fixerai”) by writing the memories of childhood, moments of douceur and jouissance.31 But he never “fixes,” since his writings are a continual rewriting, an absolute text which never ends, always adding, always taking away, changing tone and color. In this earthly world, “there is nothing solid to which the heart can attach itself.”32 The idea of attachment, of being yoked, is indeed a powerful one for Rousseau: it is what he searches for – thinking himself made for nothing else – but never finds. By writing, Rousseau seeks to cast out his submission to the yoke of prejudice. This is why he cannot stop, because his project is never complete. His political project preaches an absolute attachment between the citizen and the state. His educational project is about distancing the subject from any false attachments and attaining the only true attachment, to nature. Rousseau’s own relationships, starting with his father, then with Madame de Warens and others, are about how attachments fail (in a way, how the primal separation from the womb can never be mended). The only true attachment Rousseau achieves is through writing. “The only solid consolation,”33 which casts him “in the heart of the truest happiness,”34 writing fixes the world into a stable order, one of his own


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making. “Let us therefore begin by setting all the facts aside, for they do not affect the question,” he writes.35 J u d g i ng p ol i t ic s a s non p ol i t ic s Writing represents the sphere of freedom in which Rousseau can throw off the yoke of prejudice, but it remains another thread in the web of society’s falseness when the writer must bear a false education and live under corrupt laws. This is why Rousseau regards the reform of government and politics as crucial. In his political writings, Rousseau uses yoke imagery in striking ways. The ostensibly simple metaphor of the yoke becomes modified to symbolize not simply undesirable physical force, a static quality, but the dynamic force of opinion, which brings with it its own form of tyranny.36 It is by realigning the yoke of opinion to the necessity of nature and law that true government can be created and judged. The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts begins with a historical sketch of how material progress leads to corruption, and the paragraphs on Greece and Rome both use the joug to explain the final decadence. While not straying far from the common use of “yoke as oppressor,” Rousseau situates this force within a historical process by linking it to opinion, especially in his discussion of Rome. After listing “a crowd of obscene authors” which made Rome “the shame of nations,” Rousseau notes: The World Capital finally falls under the yoke she had imposed on so many Peoples, and the day of her fall was the eve of the day one of her Citizens was given the title Arbiter of Good Taste.37

Rousseau’s criticism of Paris, which dictates opinion through bon goût, is only too apparent here. The final use of joug in the main body of the text appears two paragraphs later and concerns China. That Rousseau structures his historical sketch of decadence for these different epochs to conclude in each case with a yoke is the important point. In a short space, and throughout a crucial portion of his argument, this image becomes dominant. At the same time, Rousseau lauds those peoples whom he believes deserve freedom. The Spartans were given the “yoke” of virtue by Lycurgus.38 The only modern people who are free, he claims, are the Swiss, whose virtues “created their own happiness and [are] an example for other Nations.”39 The other people not under the yoke, and who will never be under it (Rousseau fears the Swiss will succumb to modern opinions and no longer be “ancient men in modern times”),40 are “the American

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Savages”: “what yoke would one impose on men who need nothing?”41 This remark appears in a footnote at the beginning of the text, a comment on the deplorable plight of the “civilized peoples” who have “the semb lance of all the virtues without the possession of any.”42 The main theme of the essay is the need to restructure society so that, like the Spartans under Lycurgus’ yoke, people may learn “what they ought to do as men and now what they ought to forget.”43 The other political writings modify and expand upon this theme. The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men is dedicated to the Republic of Geneva. Despite his poor health and the knowledge that his work would be met with disapproval, Rousseau insisted on making the long trip from Paris to Geneva upon its publica tion. He had left his native city in 1738; on his return, half his life had been spent outside its walls.44 The Geneva he describes is not divided into classes but is a picture of perfect unity. Rousseau knew that this blatant falsehood would not be appreciated by the Conseil; but if Geneva did not want him, he had done his duty as a citizen. “The purest patriotism had dictated” him to accept the “ joug” of his native city without prevarication.45 This is a different yoke, not a restraint but a guide. The yoke Rousseau that acknowledges in the Dedication is that of law: I would have wished to live and die free, that is to say subject to the laws that neither I nor anyone else could shake off their honorable yoke: that salutary and gentle yoke, which the proudest heads bear with all the more docility because they are suited to bear no other.46

This double repetition of “joug” signals its importance, especially as it appears so early in the text (the fourth paragraph), and such words used early on structure what follows. The repetition is even more significant in the opening paragraphs, all of which open with “I would have wished” or a close approximation. The yoke imagery opens the way for Rousseau’s claim that the law must be of absolute equality, with no citizen above and none outside of it. The yoke of law is not located spatially: it is, like the sky, everywhere in the republic; neither vice nor virtue “could be hidden from the notice and judgment of the Public.”47 Significantly, Montesquieu never used “joug” in discussing the laws.48 Rousseau’s understanding of law underlies his desire to reconstitute society from social divisions and to endow it with legit imacy, under a yoke like the Christian one, “healthy and sweet,” which all can freely accept. This is, indeed, the grand project of his great political writings. The yoke of law, “this celestial voice that tells each citizen the


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precepts of public reason,” makes the body politic “a moral being” with only one object, “the good of the people.” The people are indivisible and whole, equal under the law which gives advantage to and exempts no one, not even the chief of state, whose first duty is to be equal to all others under the law.49 Three paragraphs later the joug reappears, and this time the veiled criticism of Geneva becomes apparent: Once Peoples are accustomed to Masters, they are no longer able to do without them. If they try to shake off the yoke, they move all the farther away from freedom because, mistaking for freedom an unbridled license which is its opposite, their revolutions almost always deliver them to seducers who only make their chains heavier.50

The Romans are given as an example, and the debt to Machiavelli’s Discorsi is unmistakable, as Rousseau’s last phrase of the paragraph makes clear: “not only free but worthy of being so.”51 The main question of the Second Discourse is: What makes a person worthy of liberty? Unlike the philosophes, Rousseau does not coolly investigate prejudices to find their source; he deals with inequality because it is intimately connected to liberty. Proud and holy liberty! If only those poor people could know you, if only they realized at what price you are acquired and conserved, if only they felt how much more severe are your laws than the yokes of tyrants.52

Laws in modern society are products of force, whereas, in nature, every man is independent of others, “free of the yoke” and “the law of the stronger.”53 The first movement away from what nature prescribes commences when gains in the organization of labor led to the development of leis ure and a penchant for material progress: “that was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it, and the first source of the evils they prepared for their Descendants.”54 Men acquire false needs (what their fathers had lived without) and oblige others to follow this path. “Everything begins to change its appearance”: man begins to compare and judge, to consider his preferences as worth fulfilling at the cost of human blood.55 What is not taken into account, Rousseau argues, is what is truly necessary, what makes one’s humanity truly valuable. Social regeneration will have to be gradual because duplicity has deep roots, but it can be done because what nature prescribes is “the simple, uniform, and solitary way of life.”56 It is natural man under the oak tree which feeds and shades him (unlike the trees on the road to Vincennes,

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which are denatured so as to not offer shade)57 and provides him a place to sleep – a man who cannot be seen from on high but who has to be seen horizontally, on a level of equality by others. This is a life without judgment, where everyone is equal because all follow the same law, that of nature. This is the yoke to which Rousseau attaches himself: “He bears the yoke of the necessity of things without difficulty, but not so the yoke of the will of men.”58 Rousseau thus turns to the construction of a political society under the guide of genuine values, aligned with nature. The social contradictions he wants to amend are spelled out in the original version of the Social Contract: From this new order of things comes into being a multitude of relations without measure or rule, without consistency, that men alter and change continually, with 100 men working to destroy, for each man trying to fix them; and as the relative existence of a man in the state of nature depends upon a thousand other relations which are in a continual flux, he can never be sure of being the same person in two moments of his life.59

The need to align himself – psychologically more than anything else – with a sure rule drives Rousseau’s project: the politics of a man who does not want politics, if by “politics” one means the continual jostling for power, questions of policy, and factional conflicts (who is “going up” or “going down” on the political market, as in the memoirs of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld or the Duc de Saint-Simon). Such heated debates are a sign of sickness, not of health.60 This “variation which makes the State always float from maxim to maxim, policy to policy” makes it impossible to have “a fixed objective or a consistent conduct.”61 This makes man live “always outside of himself.”62 His political project is a transference: Rousseau, who always felt subjugué by opinion, will replace it by law and nature, “the law of nature, this holy law … which talks to a man’s heart and to his mind.”63 Rousseau’s bold idea in the Social Contract goes beyond that of his immediate predecessors, who were trying to justify government at all costs and whose standard of evaluation was always durability. Given the specific details in his projects for Corsica and Poland, seeing the Social Contract as following in the same line of thought is a mistake, for Rousseau is not trying to establish a workable system of government, as he himself admits in observing that very few peoples are uncorrupted and able to have good government.64 His project seeks instead to judge government: What gives it rights? What makes it legitimate – a term used by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in the sense of property, the church, or birth, but never in a


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moral sense?65 The judgment Rousseau seeks is moral, to make government not the arbiter of morality, as Hobbes would have it, but its slave. The contradiction between this and Rousseau’s earlier work can be plainly expressed as that between the freedom Rousseau vaunts in the two Discourses and the “forced to be free” of the Social Contract.66 But the freedom in the first two Discourses is not unbounded. The yoke of opinion must give way to the yoke of nature so that genuine needs can be understood and met. The same line of reasoning applies to the Social Contract, which tries to eliminate everyday politics to make each citizen whole. The goal is a kind of absolute transparency, where everyone is “under the eyes of his fellow citizens and has the desire for public approval.”67 The great gain of civil society is moral liberty, “which alone makes man master of himself.”68 This is the only compensation for leaving the oak tree behind, and it is what government must ensure. But moral liberty cannot exist under a government that is less than a unity because things will always come back “to preferences,” whereas the general will always tends toward equality, the necessary condition for morality and liberty.69 There needs to be a unity between the individual and the state, Rousseau writes – thus we can reformulate as the test of government: the people, subject [soumis] to the laws of the State like those of nature, would be … aware that the same power forms man and city, and thus they obey freely and wear with docility the yoke of the public welfare.70

What Rousseau realizes is that political projects which fail in this regard are nothing but force instituted over men, obeyed because force is strong. In offering nothing that can touch an individual, society becomes a free exchange, which everyone uses to his advantage. While individuals can go along with this for a while, at a certain point, Rousseau seems to argue, an individual will recognize that what is above him, commanding him, is nothing but a false appearance. Insofar as it is the mask of something else, the day of its fall is inevitable.71 T h e yok e of t h e v i r t uous m a n Good government and good laws are useless without good citizens to follow them. That is why education is perhaps the most important aspect of Rousseau’s work. But what does it mean to make man good? Although one of his most pessimistic works, the Dialogues contains perhaps Rousseau’s most drawn-out statement of “an ideal world.” In appearance, it is not different from our own; it is, however, utopian in its depiction of how individuals behave. Rousseau thinks this ideal world

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would be possible because it doesn’t require greater complexity or material progress; rather, it is obtained through simplicity. To follow instincts instead of opinion; to understand one’s needs as opposed to one’s desires; these should be simple things, Rousseau reasons, but in a world deformed by opinion, they are in fact the hardest thing.72 That is why one of his prayers has him asking of God, “guide us always on the path of virtue, do not let us ever stray.”73 What makes an individual content is limited: peace, repos and repas, pleasant company – but in a warped society, le sentiment de l’existence is hard to attain. When describing it to Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Rousseau notes, “I dined with great appetite … and no image of servitude or dependence troubled the good feeling that united us all.”74 But why does this particular absence convince him he has something? And is this image that of the yoke? The Rêveries casts some light on this: le sentiment de l’existence only occurs “when I leave my head entirely free, and my ideas follow their course without resistance or obstacles.”75 A sudden or irregular movement “destroys the charm of the reverie and tears us away from within ourselves to put us back [remettre] instantly under the yoke of chance and men and bring us back to the feeling of our misfortunes.”76 Note the use of remettre – again, as if the habitual state of man is to be under a false yoke: “So long as I act freely, I am good and I do nothing but good; but as soon as I feel the yoke, either of necessity or of men, I become rebellious or rather resistant – and then I am nothing.”77 In this world, virtue has to be “a purely negative regime.”78 The douceur of virtue is impossible amidst the amertume of social life. Jean-Jacques is not virtuous because his virtue has always been negative. Yet that is still better than trying to live by the false duties that society prescribes. There are too many complications: no longer finding among men either rectitude or truth or any of the feelings I thought were innate in their souls because they were in mine, and without which all society is only deceit and lies … the society of men has for a long time offered only a false appearance without reality, without truth, without appeal [attachement] … and more worthy of my scorn than my zeal [empressement].79

Rousseau’s writings are an attempt to move man away from préjugés, of being subjugué by opinion, and towards a solid judgment, a move from amour propre toward the natural amour de soi, from paraître to être: “But me, detached from them and everything, what am I myself? That’s what is left for me to find,” he wrote at the end of his life.80


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Consider Rousseau’s dread of one word: flottant. “Always afraid, floating in such cruel uncertainty”: this is modern man.81 Instead of a “constant manner of being,” which would allow him to be “content to feel what he is,” modern man is always wavering between extremes.82 This is what makes moral virtue, the greatest gift and the most human characteristic, impossible: it is fleeting and of no discernible origin: I reached the age of 40 floating between poverty and wealth, between wisdom and forlornness, full of vices contracted out of habit though without any bad tendencies in my heart, living by chance, without principles my reason had decided upon, and distracted from my duties without despising them, but often without knowing them well.83

In the third Rêverie, the opposition between flottant and fixer structures the text.84 Flottant, Rousseau searches for something to fix himself to, but everything he reads and sees discourages him; he cannot attach himself: “their philosophy is for others; I need one for myself.”85 What would this philosophy accomplish? “Let us fix for once my opinions and principles, and let us be for the rest of my life what I will have found I have to be, having given it much thought.”86 What is the goal of this endeavor? “I will be happy if through progress upon myself I learn to leave life not better, for that is not possible, but more virtuous than I entered it.”87 Rousseau understands that, as a moral ideal, le sentiment de l’existence is inadequate: “my sins are those of inaction.”88 This is why the emphasis on virtue underlies his writings. As he describes it, JeanJacques “imprisoned himself for ten to twelve years in the course of writing fifteen volumes speaking the sweetest, purest, most vigorous language of virtue.”89 His description of the virtuous man is one who yokes himself: A person who knows how to govern his own heart, keep all his passions under the yoke [sous le joug], over whom personal interest and sensual desires have no power, and who, either in public or in private with no witness, does always only what is just and honest, without heeding the secret wishes of his heart: he alone is a virtuous man.90

This virtuous man has eliminated uncertainty and rests upon certain principles. “Those who are men are subject to error just as I am; how can they pretend that their reason can be the judge of mine, and what I can be punished for not having thought as they do?”91 This is what has to be avoided; the solution is to accept “justice, the public good, obedience to natural and positive laws, social virtues, and all the duties of man

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and citizen.”92 To use the language of Rousseau’s time, these are natural sentiments which no honest heart could deny. All of these, according to Rousseau, are grouped under religion. The writers of his times are “all liars”; Plato can be sublime, but “when it comes to morals, only the Gospel is always certain, always true, always unique, and always consistent [semblable] with itself.”93 This last bit is a continuation of Rousseau’s preoccupation with paraître; that God is God (before being good) is the important point. With obvious approval, Rousseau states that Jesus announces that his kingdom will not come through appearances.94 But the religion Rousseau cares for is not that of a particular kind: The authority I give to the Gospels I do not give to the interpretations of men, and I don’t intend to submit them to mine more than I would submit myself to theirs. … To let oneself be guided by another on such a matter is to substitute interpretation to the written text, it is to submit to man and not to God.95

Rousseau is, however, a Christian, by which he means a follower of Christ: “My Lord, I am a Christian and sincerely a Christian, according to the doctrine in the Gospels. I am a Christian not as a disciple of priests but as a disciple of Christ.”96 His composed prayers and the 1737 Testament reveal an utterly conventional religious faith. Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment (I Cor 1:10).97

That Christianity has failed in this regard – these words seem to be made for Rousseau – means that education has to do the rest.98 In order not to have Emile floating all his life between nature and man, Rousseau needs to provide him with fixed principles “whose truth or falseness have to be known because they make the happiness or misfortune of humanity.”99 Education fails if it does not recognize this: Taken by nature and men on opposite roads, forced to divide ourselves between these different forces, we follow a compromise between the two which leads us neither to one nor the other goal. In this way, beaten down and floating throughout our life, we finish it without having been able to agree with ourselves, and being good neither for ourselves nor for others.100

Nature is the chemin: “Observe nature and follow the route she lays out for you.”101 From it “the duties of man” are taught.102 Virtue, he announced in 1750, is “the strength and vigor of the soul,”103 and what his contemporaries lacked, he would teach an orphan without exceptional qualities.


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These duties, valid because of nature, are an attempt to make Emile’s humanity blossom, to engender “the notions of good and evil which truly make him a man.”104 The end is always virtue, but the means that the gouverneur adopts yoke Emile. The last words of the Favre manuscript indicate this: “I have made a man. I hope that he will accomplish his duty on this earth; as for me, I have accomplished mine.”105 The notion of making a man requires a kind of invisible yoke around him; he must think he is free to find out that he has been mistaken. This is preferable to the cruel education Rousseau sees around him, which denies children their childhood: What should one think of this barbarous education which sacrifices the present for an uncertain future, which burdens a child with all sorts of chains … Even if I thought that the object of this education was reasonable, how could I see without indignation the poor wretches submitted to an unbearable yoke and condemned to continual labors like galley slaves, without even being certain that such cares will ever be useful to them? The age of happiness passes in the midst of tears, punishments, threats, and slavery.106

Everything has its place in the order of things, and this is what education should recognize: “Assign to everyone his place and fix him there, order the human passions according to the constitution of the man: this is all we can do for his well-being.”107 Aligning his education with the child’s natural inclinations, the gouverneur must form Emile, making sure that his desires never exceed his forces and that “he feels early on upon his noble head the hard yoke that nature imposes on man, the heavy yoke of necessity under which any finished being has to bend.”108 This makes him “patiently endure the necessity of things but not the malignant will of others.”109 Through this primarily moral education, Rousseau wants Emile to fulfill his moral duties humanely because he has accepted and understood them through experience and sentiment, “our true masters.”110 At the end of his education, the gouverneur says to Emile, who is ready to marry Sophie: “One must bear the yoke that one has imposed upon oneself. Be good enough so that it is light.”111 Conjugium is Emile’s entry into adulthood and the end of the gouverneur’s authority. But the virtues created for him are private ones, as the sequel’s title, Emile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires, attests. And, at the end of it all, as the original plan had it, would be a prayer.112 Does this imply a necessary despair? Rousseau said of his own education that no child had a better one, surely an exaggeration. But what Emile as a book – and not as an actual educational practice that some disappointed eighteenth-century readers tested on their children – tries

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to do is to paint a picture in which virtue can flourish. It is, in a sense, a refutation of the deep pessimism that Rousseau’s critics accused him of. By calling Emile a “savage” to live in cities, Rousseau suggests that he loved savages more than civilization, but he did not. Emile is the fictional projection of virtues that were possible but which society had stopped seeing. No t e s 1 Rousseau, Mon portrait, OC, vol. i, p. 188. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted to originate from The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990). 2 Ebauches des rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1165. 3 E. Weil, “Rousseau et sa politique,” in G. Genette and T. Todorov (eds.), Pensée de Rousseau (Paris: Seuil, 1984), p. 10. 4 Fragment biographique, OC, vol. i, p. 1117. 5 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 174. 6 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 45. 7 Lettres à Malesherbes, OC, vol. i, p. 1137. 8 Livy, Ab urbe condita, 14 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919–1959), book ix, section v.6–vi.9. 9 Livy, Ab urbe condita, book iii, section 23.5; book ix, section 4.3; book x, section 36.14; book ix, section 61.1. 10 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 86. 11 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 692; Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 26. The same image is used in the following paragraph. 12 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 829; Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 131. 13 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 912; Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 196. 14 Lettre à Beaumont, OC, vol. iv, p. 930. 15 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 676; Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 15. 16 Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, OC, vol. iii, p. 960. 17 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 728; Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 53. 18 Discours sur les sciences et les arts, OC, vol. iii, p. 3; Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 3. 19 Project concernant de nouveaux signes pour la musique, OC, vol. v, p. 129. 20 Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’ inégalité parmi les hommes, OC, vol. iii, p. 133. 21 Ebauches des rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1170; see also Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1000. 22 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 180. 23 Rousseau may have read about the Roman triumph in B. de Montfaucon, L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures, 5 vols. (Paris: F. Delaulne, 1719), vol. iv, pp. 152–61. Regarding the Roman triumph and passing under the


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yoke, I base my interpretation on J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd edn., 12 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1911), vol. xi, pp. 194–5; A. van Gennep, Les Rites de passage (Paris: A. and J. Picard, 1981 [1909]), pp. 275–6; and W. W. Fowler, Roman Essays and Interpretations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1920), pp. 72–5. 24 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 17. 25 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 35. 26 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 19. 27 “Inébranlable” in this context means obstinate; but note that “ébranler” has as its primary meaning “secouer.” 28 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 9. This description comes in the paragraph describing Rousseau’s reading and his claim that “I thought myself as a Greek or Roman.” Rousseau describes himself with the same language in Book iii: “My spirit is annoyed with any kind of yoke … My spirit wants to walk at its own pace, it cannot submit [soumettre] to another’s.” OC, vol. i, p. 119. 29 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 676; Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 14. Consider the theory of two births in life from Emile: “We are born, to put it so, twice: once to exist, and the other to live, one for the species and the other for sex.” OC, vol. iv, p. 489. 30 Lettres à Malesherbes, OC, vol. i, p. 1136. 31 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 999. 32 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1046. 33 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 729. 34 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 247. 35 Discours sur l’origine, OC, vol. iii, p. 132; Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 19. 36 “Our natural passions are very limited and they are the instruments of our freedom which tend to conserve us. All the passions that subjugate and destroy us come from outside; they were not given to us by nature, and we make them our own to the detriment of nature.” Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 491. 37 Discours sur les sciences, OC, vol. iii, p. 10; Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 8. 38 Discours sur les sciences, OC, vol. iii, p. 24 n2. Lycurgus “imposed a yoke of iron,” Rousseau writes; this is Jeremiah 28:14: “For thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; I have put a yoke of iron upon the neck of all these nations.” This is to punish Hananiah, who disobeyed the Lord and taught rebellion against Him. 39 Discours sur les sciences, OC, vol. iii, p. 11; Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 8. 40 La Nouvelle Héloïse, OC, vol. ii, p. 60. 41 Discours sur les sciences, OC, vol. iii, p. 7; Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 5. 42 Discours sur les sciences, OC, vol. iii, p. 7; Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 5. 43 Discours sur les sciences, OC, vol. iii, p. 24; Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 18. 44 He did pay the city tax of seventeen florins for the guards on August 20, 1755 and March 30, 1757; F. Jost, Jean-Jacques Rousseau suisse: étude sur sa personnalité et sa pensée, 2 vols. (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1961), vol. i, p. 27. 45 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 395.

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46 Discours sur l’origine, OC, vol. iii, p. 112; Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 4. 47 Discours sur l’origine, OC, vol. iii, p. 112; Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 3. 48 In De l’esprit des lois, Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu uses “joug” only once, following Plutarch in his discussion of the divorce of Carvilius from his sterile wife and the yoke imposed upon him by the consuls. Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Roger Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949–1951), vol. ii, pp. 520–1. 49 Discours sur l’ économie politique, OC, vol. iii, pp. 249, 245, 248. 50 Discours sur l’origine, OC, vol. iii, p. 113; Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 4. 51 Discours sur l’origine, OC, vol. iii, p. 113; Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 5. 52 Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, OC, vol. iii, p. 974. 53 Discours sur l’origine, OC, vol. iii, p. 162. 54 Discours sur l’origine, OC, vol. iii, p. 168; Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 46. 55 Discours sur l’origine, OC, vol. iii, p. 169; Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 47. 56 Discours sur l’origine, OC, vol. iii, p. 138; Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 23. 57 Lettres à Malesherbes (OC, vol. i, p. 1135) does not mention the question of shade; the Dialogues (OC, vol. i, pp. 828–9) does not either. 58 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 845; Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 143. 59 Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, p. 282. 60 Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, p. 439. 61 Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, p. 412. 62 Discours sur l’origine, OC, vol. iii, p. 193; Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 66. 63 Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, OC, vol. iii, p. 973. 64 Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, pp. 390–1. 65 J. Kline, “In the Absence of Legitimacy,” unpublished paper, Department of Government, Harvard University (2005). 66 Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, p. 364. 67 Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, OC, vol. iii, p. 968. 68 Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, p. 365. 69 Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, pp. 368, 391. 70 Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, p. 383. 71 Perhaps that is why liberal democracy has lasted for so long: it promises nothing and denies any higher value to itself. The moment it begins to claim that it is in the interest of men’s souls, it will tumble. 72 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, pp. 668–9. 73 Prière, OC, vol. iv, p. 1034. 74 Lettres à Malesherbes, OC, vol. i, p. 1141. 75 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1002. 76 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, pp. 1044, 1047. 77 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1059. 78 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 855; Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 151. This is Emile’s education as well. 79 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, pp. 727–9; Collected Writings, vol. i, pp. 52–3. 80 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 995.


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81 Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 243. 82 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 798. 83 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1014. See also Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 12, where he describes himself as “always floating between weakness and courage, between lethargy and virtue.” Milord Edward reproaches Saint Preux: “A good heart is, I must say, the foremost organ of truth; whoever has not felt cannot learn and does nothing but float from error to error.” La Nouvelle Héloïse, OC, vol. ii, p. 523. 84 As the usage in Book v of the Confessions shows: “I passed two or three years this way, between music, training, projects, voyages, floating incessantly from one thing to another, looking to fix myself without knowing to what.” OC, vol. i, p. 218. 85 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1016. 86 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1016. 87 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1023. 88 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1059. 89 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 687; Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 22. 90 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 863; Collected Writings, vol. i, pp. 157–8 (translation modified). 91 Lettres écrites de la montagne, OC, vol. iii, p. 692. 92 Lettres écrites de la montagne, OC, vol. iii, pp. 694–5. 93 Discours sur l’origine, OC, vol. iii, p. 133; Lettres écrites de la montagne, OC, vol. iii, p. 728n. The Bible is “of all books the most sublime.” Lettre à d’Alembert, OC, vol. v, p. 12. 94 Lettres écrites de la montagne, OC, vol. iii, pp. 733–5. 95 Lettres écrites de la montagne, OC, vol. iii, p. 736. 96 Lettre à Beaumont, OC, vol. iv, p. 960. 97 Testament de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, du 27 juin 1737, OC, vol. i, p. 1212. 98 Religion and education go together for Rousseau, naturally; education without religion is not what he advocates. Mémoire à M. de Mably, OC, vol. iv, p. 8. 99 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 242. 100 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 251. Earlier in the text the same point is made with the same language: “Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his desires and his duties, he will never be a man or a citizen. He won’t be good either for himself or for others. He will be one of those modern men, a Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois: he will be nothing.” OC, vol. iv, pp. 249–50. 101 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 259. 102 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 266. 103 Discours sur les sciences, OC, vol. iii, p. 8; Collected Writings, vol. ii, p. 6. 104 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 501. 105 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 238. 106 Emile, OC, vol. iv, pp. 301–2.

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107 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 305. 108 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 320. 109 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 320. 110 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 445. 111 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 867. 112 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 60.

Ch apter 11

Rousseau’s ruins* Louisa Shea

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was buried in the gardens of the marquis de Girardin at Ermenonville, and his remains were solemnly laid to rest in a monument designed by Hubert Robert, an artist known primarily for his vast and impressive production of ruin paintings. The tomb was erected in the vicinity of the garden’s most impressive folly, the Temple of Philosophy, which Girardin had modeled on the remains of the Sibyl’s temple at Tivoli, and which he had deliberately constructed as a ruin to indicate the incomplete nature of the philosophical project. Heavy blocks of stone lay scattered around its base, redeemed only by a motto, “Qui l’achèvera?” (Who will complete it?), expressive of the hope that the future might salvage the ruined state of humanity. By the late eighteenth century, as Rousseau’s final resting place suggests, ruins had become fashionable in Europe as objects of artistic representation and philosophical contemplation. There was no greater chic than to erect a broken Roman column, genuine or ersatz, in one’s garden. But if ruins were designed to stir the soul and elevate the mind, they also served as the impetus for political commentary. As the century neared its end, the ruins of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Egypt became the object of increasingly numerous literary and artistic representations, almost invariably coupled with scorn for the decadence of their presentday descendants and a glorification of the political and cultural strengths of the expanding European empires. Napoleon’s careful documentation of antiquities during his expedition to Egypt in the late 1790s was no innocent act of classification; it belonged to an emerging imperial policy that answered the Temple of Philosophy’s “Qui l’achèvera?” with a resounding, “La France.” Such confidence was mirrored, however, by a deep anxiety regarding the fragility of a rapidly changing French society and its emerging empire, an anxiety that also found its literary and artistic expression in the form of ruins – one thinks of Hubert Robert’s apocalyptic Imaginary View of the Grand Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins (1796), 193

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or Constantin-François Volney’s chastening The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1791), which turns a visit to the ruins of Palmyra into the occasion for a meditation not, as with Napoleon, on empire, but on the injustices of contemporary French society. The text opens with the following invocation: Solitary ruins, sacred tombs, ye mouldering and silent walls, all hail! To you I address my Invocation … Pregnant, I may truly call you, with useful lessons, with pathetic and irresistible advice to the man who knows how to consult you. A while ago the whole world bowed the neck in silence before the tyrants that oppressed it; and yet in that hopeless moment you already proclaimed the truths that tyrants hold in abhorrence: mixing the dust of the proudest kings with that of the meanest slaves, you called upon us to contemplate this example of EQUALITY. From your caverns, whither the musing and anxious love of LIBERTY led me, I saw escape its venerable shade.1

Never mind that Volney likely never set foot in Palmyra. His fiction consecrated the ruin as a material witness to the revolution of empires, a warning to despots, and a symbol of liberty. Volney was of course not the first to ground his philosophy of liberty on a meditation on ruins; others had paved the way. In 1771, Louis-Sébastien Mercier built the utopian society of L’An 2440 (translated into English as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred) quite literally on the rubble of Versailles: his dream of a better world ends with the striking image of an old man, sitting alone among the ruins of a once magnificent palace, weeping. He is, we learn, none other than Louis xiv, expiating his sins amidst the wreck of his ancient pomp, and calling out for all to hear: “May these ruins cry out to all sovereigns, that they who abuse their momentary power only reveal their weakness to future generations.”2 Even Denis Diderot, who was by and large more interested in the picturesque effect of ruins, did on occasion exploit their political potential, as in the following invective against tyrants, taken from his criticism of the painting Other Ruins, by Hubert Robert: It’s a palace, or rather it was one … Time has reduced the residence of one of the world’s masters, of one of these wild beasts that devoured kings and that devour men, to dust … Well, well, the powerful men of the earth who believed they built for the ages, who erected such superb residences for themselves … nothing remains of their work, of their enormous expenditure, of their grand visions but debris serving to shelter some of the most indigent and unfortunate members of the human race, much more useful as ruins than ever they were in their initial splendor.3

By the close of the century, meditation on ruins had become a commonplace synonymous with the critique of despotism and the praise of liberty,

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poised anxiously alongside a celebration of Europe as the new civilizing power. Rousseau’s ruminations on ruins partake of this anxiety. His meditations counter the rush toward modernization with marked skepticism, and turn to the past as a symbol of lost liberty. Yet each attempt to reconstruct the whole from the fragments of the past seems foiled by the ruinous nature of the present. Architectural ruins, associated positively with the past grandeur of Rome, with civic virtue and the liberty of man in society (one thinks, for instance, of Rousseau’s ecstatic response to the Pont du Gard in Book vi of the Confessions), coexist uncomfortably alongside the less glorious ruins associated with the decadence of modern man (as in the famous analogy between civilized man and the ruined statue of Glaucus in the Second Discourse, or the leitmotif expressed so succinctly in Julie, or the New Heloïse: “Europe strides swiftly to its ruin”).4 By studying three key moments in Rousseau’s meditation on ruins – his visit to the ruins near Nîmes in Book vi of the Confessions, his meditation on Glaucus, and his reflections on the destruction of Lisbon – I aim to show that, while the ruins of Rome certainly possess the power to stir Rousseau and focus his longing for a lost political community (the Pont du Gard episode), the politically pregnant, classical ruin rapidly loses its power to evoke civic freedom. Time, by ruining the architectural glories of the past and subjecting them to a slow but steady degradation, has transformed the politically resonant past into a mute and empty sign (the Arena at Nîmes). As the Second Discourse makes clear, the philosopher shifts his gaze from the past (the ruin as model of lost civic virtue), to the present: his task is now to investigate the ruin as the condition of modernity (Glaucus). I hope to show that the ruin retains its moral and political resonance as a call to liberty, but that this call has shifted from an awed, atemporal reunion with an imagined Roman community to a demand that the cause of society’s ruin be investigated. G l or ious ru i ns: t h e P on t du G a r d The first passage I would like to consider, from Book vi of the Confessions, recounts Rousseau’s earliest encounter with the ruins of antiquity. The context is important: the young Jean-Jacques, then still a boarder of Madame de Warens, leaves his beloved Maman for a short cure at Montpellier; on the way, he falls, rather to his surprise, into the arms of a certain Madame de Larnage, whom he promises to visit again at the conclusion of his treatment. The lovers part ways shortly before Montpellier,

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and Jean-Jacques, still dreamy with love, makes one last stop, alone, to take in the Roman ruins around Nîmes. Rousseau’s first encounter with ruins occurs, that is, in the midst of his domestic idyll (these are the Charmettes days), but also in the middle of a second, sexual idyll, with Madame de Larnage. This brief visit to the ruins, although meant only as a passing tourist’s fancy, becomes a turning point in Rousseau’s life narrative: the ruins of Rome quite literally ruin both his idylls and open the doors to a different, political ideal. The Pont du Gard dispels Rousseau’s sexual idyll swiftly and comically. Before arriving at the site, Rousseau was sitting happily in his traveling chaise, very content … to dream about the pleasures I had tasted, and about those promised to me more at my ease … I saw only Mme de Larnage and her surroundings. All the rest of the universe was nothing to me.5

When, only hours later, Rousseau stands before the Pont du Gard, his reverie has dramatically changed object: I remained there several hours in a ravishing contemplation. I returned from it distracted and a dreamer, and this reverie was not favorable to Madame de Larnage. She had thought of forearming me against the girls of Montpellier, but not against the Pont Du Gard. One never thinks of everything.6

Rousseau humorously describes the Pont du Gard as his “new lover,” in what we can only interpret as a less than polite comment on Madame de Larnage’s charms; but, more seriously, Jean-Jacques’s new object of desire functions as a rite of passage from the intimate world of sex and love to the manly domain of politics. The passage, in which Rousseau deciphers the meaning of the ancient ruin, is worth quoting at length: After a breakfast of excellent figs, I took a guide, and I went to see the Pont du Gard. It was the first work of the Romans I had seen. I expected to see a monument worthy of the hands that had constructed it. This time the object surpassed my expectation, and this was the only time in my life. It belongs only to the Romans to produce this effect. The sight of this simple and noble work struck me all the more since it is in the middle of a wilderness where silence and solitude render the object more striking and the admiration more lively; for this so-called bridge was only an aqueduct. One asks oneself what force transported these enormous rocks so far from any quarry, and brought together the arms of so many thousands of men in a place where none of them live. I wandered about the three stories of this superb edifice, although my respect for it almost kept me from daring to trample it underfoot. The reverberation of my steps on these immense vaults made me believe I heard the strong voices of those who had built them. I lost myself like an insect in that immensity. While making myself small,

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I felt an indefinable something that raised up my soul, and I said to myself while sighing, “Why was I not born a Roman!”7

Rousseau’s initial response to the Roman aqueduct lacks the direct political rhetoric that accompanied so many writings on ruins in the latter part of the century – from Mercier’s and Volney’s critiques of tyranny to Napoleon’s imperialist discourse. Jean-Jacques’s spellbound reaction to the Pont du Gard appears to model an aesthetic rather than a political reading, evoking the proper aesthetic response to the ruin that Diderot theorizes in his “poetics of the ruin,” one that demands neither indignation nor national pride, but the loss of self in an intimation of immortality: The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand, everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures. How old is this world! I walk between two eternities.8

Rousseau’s awed description of the “silence and solitude” of the Roman vestige, his erasure of all other visitors from the site, his vivid evocation of his resounding footsteps, and his auditory confirmation of the vastness and isolation of the structure all conform so closely to Diderot’s prescription for the representations of ruins that one might almost imagine that Rousseau is consciously responding to the advice his once dear friend gave to the painter Hubert Robert: Monsieur Robert … as you’ve committed yourself to the painting of ruins, be advised that this genre has its own poetics … Don’t you see there are too many figures here … ? Only those enhancing the effect of solitude and silence should be retained. A solitary man who’s wandered into these shadowy precincts, his arms across his chest and his head inclined, would have made a greater impression on me; … the majesty of the building, the grandeur of the construction, the extent, serenity, and muted reverberation of the space, would have set me shuddering.9

Jean-Jacques, like Diderot, loses himself (and “all the rest of the universe,” y compris Madame de Larnage) to the rapt contemplation of the ruin. Rousseau’s interpretation of the Pont du Gard deviates, however, from Diderot’s poetics in one important respect: Rousseau’s aesthetic response serves, in the end, as the vehicle of a political awakening, not as the vehicle of an existential experience. True, Rousseau betrays little interest in the historical circumstances that surrounded the aqueduct’s construction and its later fall into disuse, and he displays no concern for the political implications of the imperial policies that dictated the presence of the Romans in southern France. But, if his reaction to the ancient aqueduct does not

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point to a precise historical reality, it nevertheless stands for “Romanness,” a civic and masculine ideal gleaned from his readings. It is the sheer physical strength required to construct the Pont du Gard, as well as the power to command its construction, that arrests Rousseau: One asks oneself what force transported these enormous rocks so far from any quarry, and brought together the arms of so many thousands of men in a place where none of them live.

The subject of this sentence is not a man or a group of men, but an impersonal “force,” something larger than the individual or a loose assembly of men, and of which Rousseau is momentarily a part. For a few hours, Jean-Jacques walks with the Romans, their voices echoing in his ears, his steps ringing the building back to life, in an ecstatic union with a myth ical past, in a suspended moment outside of time: his is an intimation not of immortality but of perfect harmony among men, an intimation of political unity. Rousseau grants his encounter with the Pont du Gard a special status by declaring it the sole occasion when reality proved larger than his own vast reverie: It was the first work of the Romans I had seen. I expected to see a monument worthy of the hands that had constructed it. This time the object surpassed my expectation, and this was the only time in my life.

The full force of this passage comes to light when we contrast it with Rousseau’s first encounter with Paris in Book iv of the Confessions: I had drawn it for myself like ancient Babylon [another lost splendor] … I saw only filthy and stinking little streets, nasty-looking black houses, the air of dirtiness, poverty, beggars, carters, cobblers, vendors of rotgun and old hats … The same thing happened to me at the Opera … at Versailles … when I saw the sea.10

Paris and Versailles symbolize the gulf between Rousseau’s ideal image of civic life and decaying reality; between the self and its powers of imagin ation, on the one hand, and the ever-disappointing encounter with the world, on the other. Not so the Pont du Gard. Instead, it thrusts Rousseau into a vertiginous encounter with a lost political community that engulfs and absorbs him: the aesthetic response to the ruin is the vehicle of a political prise de conscience, a tangible sign that focuses his longing for a lost political and cultural unity. In the Social Contract, Rousseau confirms his definition of freedom as the loss of the self in the whole:

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One who dares to undertake the founding of a people should feel that he is capable of changing human nature, so to speak; of transforming each individual, who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole from which this individual receives, in a sense, his life and his being.11

The young Jean-Jacques’s ecstatic aesthetic experience at the Pont du Gard marks a first step toward this political ideal. His moral fiber strengthened, Rousseau relinquishes his plans to visit Madame de Larnage and, upon the conclusion of his treatment, heads directly home to Les Charmettes: I executed [my decision] courageously, with some sighs, I admit; but also with that internal satisfaction that I tasted for the first time in my life, of saying to myself, “I deserve my own esteem, I know how to prefer my duty to my pleasure.”12

But a terrible irony awaits the young Jean-Jacques upon arriving home: far from bringing him happiness, his moral resolve has left him out in the cold. His decision to forego the sensual pleasures of Madame de Larnage’s seductions for the domestic idyll of Maman’s tender embrace leaves him bitterly disillusioned. When he arrives home, no one comes to greet him; in his absence, Madame de Warens has taken a new lover. In other words, the encounter with the ruins of antiquity takes place in the hiatus between his inclusion and exclusion from the Garden of Eden; it prefigures the ruin of his domestic idyll at Les Charmettes. The passage on the Roman aqueduct is very short, almost incidental, yet while the visit to the Pont du Gard appears tangential, it is symbolically central: it spells the end of childhood. Surely it is no accident that Rousseau’s expulsion from his first Garden of Eden, the home of Mademoiselle Lambercier, also drew to a close with a narrative of a ruined aqueduct. The first aqueduct, a small structure that Jean-Jacques and his friend ingeniously constructed to secretly channel water to a young willow tree they had planted, does not directly cause Jean-Jacques’s expulsion from the happy childhood home, but it is, significantly, the last anecdote Rousseau recounts of those happy years before his return to Geneva. He describes with good humor Monsieur Lambercier’s violent destruction of the boys’ feat of civil engineering. Although Rousseau narrates the incident with a smile, the ring of his earlier invective against the Lamberciers – the blood-curdling “Carnifex, Carnifex, Carnifex,”13 which he cried out when unjustly accused, for the first time in his life, of a crime that he did not commit – still echoes in the reader’s ear, spelling

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the end of innocence and the boy’s cruel initiation to the adult world. When he is expelled from his second Eden, Rousseau almost miraculously rediscovers the broken aqueduct of his youth, a civic structure rich in promise, returned to him almost intact and on a scale beyond his wildest dreams. No longer the plaything of women, the young Jean-Jacques decides to make his first forays into the world of politics. “All the rest of the universe was nothing for me,” he had said when enraptured by Madame de Larnage. Now a literal “rest” displaces all women and becomes his “all,” a vision of political wholeness to which Rousseau devotes the better part of his years, and from which he weaves his own version of paradise on earth. De r e l ic t ru i ns: t h e A r e n a at N î m e s I have dwelt at some length on Rousseau’s visit to the Pont du Gard because it represents a turning point in Rousseau’s life narrative. But, during the same trip, Jean-Jacques also stopped at the Arena of Nîmes, and this second ruin, which might well have commanded greater interest than the Pont du Gard – the Pont is after all, “only an aqueduct” – leaves him cold: At Nîmes I went to see the Arena. It is a much more magnificent work than the Pont du Gard, and one that made much less of an impression on me, either because my admiration exhausted itself on the first object or because the situation of the other in the middle of a city was less suited to exciting it. This vast and superb circus is surrounded by small, nasty-looking houses, and other houses that are even smaller and more nasty-looking fill the arena; so that the whole produces only a disparate and confused effect in which regret and indignation stifle pleasure and surprise.14

Again, Rousseau’s response is aesthetic rather than overtly political (“a disparate and confused effect … [that] stifle[s] pleasure”), and, in this case, it seems overtly apolitical: it offers for instance a striking contrast to Diderot’s comment on the Robert painting cited above. For Diderot, the hordes of poor living in the meager cover of the ruins (1000 or so were thought to have settled in the amphitheater at Nîmes) comment eloquently on the social inequalities of contemporary France; for Rousseau, the same hordes are nothing but nuisances that disturb his viewing pleasure and trouble his ecstatic reunion with mythical Rome. In Jean-Jacques’s eyes, the overpopulated theater at Nîmes evokes a Rome far too similar to the Paris that so disappointed him: dirty, narrow,

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overcrowded, far beneath his bookish ideal. In this case, his chief emotion is indifference, rather than disappointment, as it was with Paris: the ruin has lost its power to signify anything at all. The Pont du Gard rang with Roman voices; the theater at Nîmes is mute. It means nothing, and Rousseau might well have written home, as Gustave Flaubert did from Egypt a century later: “I think nothing at all, contrary to the great thoughts one should have in front of ruins.”15 Rousseau’s intuition, that inhabited and derelict ruins lose their ability to signify political power, was not lost on his contemporaries. Shortly before the Revolution, Louis xvi commissioned from Hubert Robert a set of four paintings to hang in his new dining room at Fontainebleau: they were to represent the Roman ruins of southern France, and included the Pont du Gard and the amphitheater at Nîmes. The latter, while not absolutely pristine, has been cleaned up, traces of contemporary habitations reduced to a minimum, and the building set off in glorious isolation. The political ramifications of such a representation did not go unnoticed: the commission was meant to reassert the French monarchy’s ties to an imper ial past, in which decay and poverty could have no part. Two centuries later, Benito Mussolini turned this insight into state policy: before Adolf Hitler’s state visit to Rome in the late 1930s, Mussolini implemented a severe preservation policy, clearing the ruins of its inhabitants and architectural accretions, so that they might stand out boldly as visible signs of Italy’s imperial past.16 For Rousseau, the Pont du Gard was not simply a sign of lost grandeur but the visible incarnation of Roman-ness, its manifest presence. The theater at Nîmes, by contrast, is an empty sign; it is a ruin in the sense that Walter Benjamin later gives to the term in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama:17 a remainder that points to something beyond it, but from which it is completely and irredeemably cut off. What began, then, as a traditional reflection on the ruin as a symbol of Roman glory gives way to a reflection on a different type of ruin, the silent, reticent ruin. Between the Pont du Gard and Nîmes, only a few hours have passed, yet something crucial has happened: Time has stepped in. History (which had somehow left the Pont du Gard untouched – the aqueduct is wonderfully preserved) intrudes at Nîmes and transforms the arena into a derelict object, a “ruined building” and not a “ruin,” to invoke the distinction put forth in the Encyclopédie: Ruin is said only of palaces, sumptuous tombs or public monuments. One would not use the term ruin when speaking of the house of a peasant or a bourgeois; one would say ruined building.18

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Modern France has, so to speak, ruined the ruin. It has transformed the arena from a classical ruin, capable of signifying political liberty, into a modern ruin, which signifies nothing at all, save the abjection of modern man. Mode r n i t y a s ru i n It is but one step from the obtuse remains of Nîmes to the famous image of a sculptural ruin with which Rousseau opens his Discourse on Inequality: Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, sea, and storms had so disfigured that it looked less like a God than a wild Beast, the human soul, altered in the bosom of society by a thousand continually renewed causes, by the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and errors, by changes that occurred in the constitution of Bodies, and by the continual impact of the passions, has, so to speak, changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable.19

Through Glaucus, Rousseau makes the silent ruin of Nîmes speak again; he reinvests the ruin with meaning by transforming the derelict object into a metaphor for modernity. The ruin no longer describes an object but a perspective, a way of reading the world: the physical reality of the Roman arena is countered by the fictional nature of the Glaucus statue, the original version of which is itself but a literary construct.20 There is, strictly speaking, no ruin in the Second Discourse, only the perception of ruin, the conscious decision to approach the world from the perspective of its ruin. Rousseau rescues the meaningless ruin of Nîmes by taking the derelict modern world, in its silence and lack of signification, as the impetus for interpretation. The ruin retains its moral and political resonance as a call to liberty, but the call takes the form no longer of a sublime fusion with the past, but of a task: the ruin spells an invitation to archeology as the basis for any possible future. To see the world as ruin is to demand that mankind take responsibility for its plight. Rousseau’s response to the earthquake at Lisbon, in the famous “Letter on Providence,” addressed to Voltaire in 1756, is a striking example of the ethical task which Rousseau assigns to the ruin. Although ostensibly written to defend Providence against the caustic attacks of Voltaire, Rousseau’s letter in fact takes a much more interesting approach to the question of destruction, by locating the root of all ruin (even that caused by seemingly natural causes) in society: I don’t see how one can look for the source of moral ill elsewhere than in free and perfected man, everywhere corrupted; and, as for physical ills, they are inevitable in any system of which man is a part; most physical ills are of our own

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creation. Without departing from your subject of Lisbon, admit, for example, that nature did not crowd together 20,000 houses of six to seven stories each, and that if the inhabitants of this big city had been more equally dispersed, and more lightly lodged, the damage would have been less, and maybe null. How many unfortunate people died in this disaster for having wanted, one to gather his clothes, another his papers, a third his money?21

Even natural ruins command responsibility. As Uwe Steiner has argued, the letter on Lisbon subtly shifts the problem of theodicy from a metaphysical question to one of the philosophy of history and resolves the issue by locating the source of our ills neither in God, nor in man, but in history:22 ill governance alone lies at the root of mankind’s ruin. For Rousseau, this is the only ethically and politically acceptable reading, the only proper code for deciphering the ruin. Confronted with the silence of the ruins at Nîmes, Rousseau now takes it upon himself to make the ruin signify once more. The philosopher, thus understood, is a decoder of ruins, whose first task is to open our eyes to the ruinous nature of the present, and to compel us to see beyond the glitter of society to the broken, fragmented nature of our modernity. C onc l us ion Rousseau’s writings set into motion a historical shift in the way in which ruins have been thought about and theorized in the West. Rousseau draws on classical interpretations of the ruin as a symbol of lost liberty, and he partakes of his age’s fascination with the aesthetics of the ruin. But he also initiates a reflection on ruins that moves beyond the civic discourse and sublime sensibility of his day to usher in a new, more modern way of looking at the ruin: with Glaucus, the ruin comes to signify the very condition of modernity. What Michel Makarius describes as the radical shift in perspective regarding the ruin in the twentieth century is already clearly present in Rousseau: But beginning in the past century, the ruptures consumed by modernity and the accumulation of disasters have rendered the ruin inseparable from the general perception of history. Degradations and destructions no longer concern only the remains of ancient buildings; little by little, ruins have come to designate the whole of society, such that they no longer bear witness to the past but to the present. Better, at the very moment it comes into being, the present gives itself as ruin, while the catastrophe becomes the paradigm of the event.23

Rousseau’s “ruinous” perspective and his correlative critique of the phil osophy of his age foreshadow a central trope of modernity, and presage

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the writings of such critics of the Enlightenment as Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno, both of whom developed their critiques of Western society as philosophies of the ruin – Benjamin very explicitly, in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), which centers upon a meditation on ruins; and Adorno more indirectly, in his celebration of the fragment and fragmentary writing as our last available means for resisting the totalizing logic of our age. But, if Rousseau ushers in the modern ruin, he stops short of embracing its desolate implications. For Rousseau, two paths of resistance remain open to mankind, one political, one personal; each outlines one of his two conceptions of liberty-in-society. Man can find wholeness again by entering into the social contract – this is Rousseau’s political response to his esthetic experience at the Pont du Gard. Or, failing the institution of such a state, the individual can regain his lost wholeness by retreating into the sphere of his inner life, a solution by which Rousseau redeems the ruined statue of Glaucus, restored, in man’s heart, to its pristine glory. The Confessions, which Rousseau describes in his preface as “the only accurate monument to my character that has not been disfigured by my enemies,”24 partake of this latter attempt. Marked by the litany “Here begin all the misfortunes of my life,” the work seeks to pin down the moment when the process of ruination was put into motion, and to put a stop to it by rescuing their author’s image from the disfiguring hands of others. One anecdote in Book xii amusingly drives the point home: Rousseau, having been informed that a certain Monsieur Laliaud of Nîmes has erected Rousseau’s bust in his library, eagerly awaits the opportunity to see his likeness – what a disappointment when he discovers that the bust is nothing but “une mauvaise esquisse en terre” (a bad figure in clay)!25 One is born, in the eyes of others, always already ruined, an incomplete fragment hewn from cheap materials. Only the act of writing might save us from permanent ruination. Adorno, facing the destruction and rubble of the Second World War, turns his back on Rousseau’s first path out of the ruins: no polit ical solution, certainly not one that alienates the individual in favor of the general will, could restore a fragmented world to happier days. The philosopher has but one, desperate task left: to brandish the dissonant fragments of his age against the false promises of a totalitarian politics. Benjamin, more subtly, shuts the door to Rousseau’s second respite from the ruin: his vision of the ruin translates Rousseau’s social analysis of the contemporary crisis into an existential-theological one, in effect reversing Rousseau’s move in his letter on the disaster of Lisbon. By linking modernity’s ruin to the Protestant rejection of free will, a rejection that

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in effect left “human actions deprived of all value,”26 Benjamin reads the ruin as the ontological condition of modernity thereby robbing us of Rousseau’s inner refuge (what is to be done when man himself, not merely man-in-society, is in a state of ruin?). Where Rousseau sought yet to reconstruct a vision of wholeness, Benjamin hopes only to gather up the debris of history. By the mid-twentieth century, Rousseau’s solutions to our ruinous modernity had themselves been ruined, caught in the movement of history and left to lie scattered about like relics of bygone hopes. What, then, remains for the modern reader of his works? Rousseau rescued the meaningless ruins of Nîmes by taking the derelict modern world, in its silence and lack of signification, as the impetus for interpretation. If we take seriously Rousseau’s injunction not to let the ruins lie mute, then any interpretation of Rousseau’s legacy must now take as its task to account for the ruin of Rousseau’s own ideals. What remains, then, is our hermeneutical relationship to the ruin, to Rousseau, and to the fragments of liberty that he sought to construct into a lasting monument to human freedom. No t e s * I would like to thank all who participated in the conference “Rousseau and the Concept of Freedom,” held in Bellagio in May 2007, for their helpful comments on a first version of this paper. 1 C.-F. Volney, The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolution of Empires, Translated from the French (London: Seale, 1795), pp. xi–xii. Emphasis in the original. 2 L.-S. Mercier, L’An deux mille quatre-cent quarante: rêve s’il en fut jamais (London, 1776), p. 314. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. 3 D. Diderot, Diderot on Art, ed. and trans. J. Goodman, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), vol. ii, p. 217. 4 Rousseau, Julie, ou, la nouvelle Héloïse, OC, vol. ii, p. 20. 5 J.-J. Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly, 12 vols. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), vol. i, pp. 213–14. For the original French, see OC, vol. i, p. 255. 6 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 214; Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 256. 7 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 214; Confessions, OC, vol. i, pp. 255–6. 8 Diderot, Diderot on Art, vol. ii, The Salon of 1767, p. 198. 9 Diderot, Diderot on Art, vol. ii, p. 198. 10 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 134; Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 159. 11 Rousseau, “Social Contract,” in Collected Writings, vol. iv, p. 155, emphasis added. For the original French, see OC, vol. iii, p. 381.

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12 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 217; Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 260. 13 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 17; Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 20. 14 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 215; Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 256. 15 “Je ne pense à rien du tout, contrairement aux grandes pensées que l’on doit avoir devant les ruines.” Letter to his mother, Cairo, January 5, 1850, in G. Flaubert, Correspondance, 4 vols. (Paris: Charpentier, 1887–1893), vol. i, p. 255. 16 On Mussolini, see A. Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), pp. 9–36. On Hubert Robert, see P. R. Radisich, Hubert Robert: Painted Spaces of the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 97–116. 17 W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by J. Osborne (London: Verso, 1998). 18 “Ruine,” in Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, ed. by D. Diderot and J. le Rond D’Alembert, 1st edn, (1751–1772), vol. xiv, p. 433. Online version: University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Projet (Winter 2008), ed. by R. Morrissey www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ ARTFL/projects/encyc/. 19 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 12. For the original French, see OC, vol. iii, p. 122. 20 For an excellent discussion of the Glaucus passage, see J. Starobinski, JeanJacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 27–33. 21 Lettre de J.-J. Rousseau à Monsieur de Voltaire (The Letter on Providence) August 18, 1756, in OC, vol. iv, p. 1061. 22 U. Steiner, Poetische Theodizee: Philosophie und Poesie in der lehrhaften Dichtung im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 2000), pp. 293–310. 23 M. Makarius, Ruines (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), p. 9. 24 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 3; Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 3, emphasis added. 25 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 513; Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 613. 26 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 138.

Ch apter 12

Can woman be free? Philip Stewart

That Rousseau was no friend of women (and even less of feminists) has long been the conclusion of many of his readers; those of Emile in particular. I am not proposing to deny this, but to approach the question of whether woman can be free in a different way, beginning, by way of counterpoint, with a quotation of a different tenor from a lawgiver who appears to differ quite dramatically from Rousseau: I instituted the order that seemed to me the simplest to observe, and the most likely to be long lasting. In each family, I decreed that the eldest would be considered as its head, unless he was unable to hold that rank for some substantial reason, the determination of which would fall to a high tribunal. The order of birth was similarly to determine all the other ranks. I did not think it proper to exclude women from the rights I granted to men. Nature gives them the same claim as it gives to us; and if the principal foundation of authority over children is the benefit of birth and education, it seems that a mother should have the larger share of it, having such an investment in those two benefits. I therefore ordered by an irrevocable law that power and authority would be according to age, without distinction of sex.1

As for participation in the governing communal body, the role of women here is limited in function only during their childbearing and childrearing years, and for this reason only, men may become members of society at forty, but women not until fifty: I saw no other reason why they should be less capable than us at that age of the tasks of government, I wanted them to have as great a role as the men. I realize that smirkers and enemies of that endearing sex invoke other reasons for the nearly universal custom of keeping them out of management: they attribute it to their weakness and ignorance. But I had an example among the Abaquis which refutes this unjust accusation. As the women there live unconstrained, and receive an education which in no way differs from that of the men, they were as vigorous and prudent as their husbands: proof enough that if they are less so in most other countries around the world, that is an effect of the injustice and tyranny of men, who attach women, in opposition to the order of nature, 207

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to occupations that weaken them, and thereby usurp an authority which the women should share with them.2

This benevolent legislator is Cleveland, Prévost’s “English philosopher” (Le philosophe anglais, ou histoire de M. Cleveland) of 1731, prescribing his new regime for the Abaqui tribe which has harbored him in the wilds of North America. His government is not conceived in terms of a social contract; indeed, it is willfully imposed by an intellect supposedly superior to its subjects; but, like Rousseau’s projected governments, it is intended to harmonize with nature and lay the bases for a permanently viable structure – in this case, one that can survive Cleveland’s eventual departure. As Georges May acknowledged back in 1963, in his seminal study Le Dilemme du roman, “So far as possible, Prévost is prepared to disregard differences of sex.”3 The reason I cite this seemingly inapposite precedent is that Rousseau recorded that he had been deeply moved by this particular novel, identifying intensely with its protagonist in the way that characterized all his most passionate reading experiences: “I do believe that the passionate and often interrupted reading of Cleveland’s imaginary woes caused me more distress than my own.”4 Moreover, and perhaps even more to the point, Rousseau’s procliv ities with respect to sentiments of nature – not to mention the powers of passion – are so remarkably in harmony with those of Prévost that one could easily cite many relevant passages in Prévost, especially from this particular novel, that could fool almost any reader were they attributed to Rousseau. Yet Cleveland’s principle of political parity seems not to have resonated in the slightest with Rousseau, and probably for a reason that goes to the heart of Rousseau’s – and Prévost’s – interpretations of nature. To begin with, Prévost in all likelihood could not have subscribed to the characterization of woman’s natural role as it is so carefully delineated in Book v of Emile. But let us turn that around, since my point has to do not with Prévost’s reaction to Rousseau but the reverse. Rousseau’s vision of the evolution of social ties in the human race simply cannot admit Prévost’s premise that comparable education for men and women could – and perhaps even less should – yield an equivalent product. And this fact ties in with an even deeper discordance, for in Cleveland Prévost in fact manifests little indulgence for the myth of the inherent superiority of unspoiled natural innocence. Certainly, Cleveland and his wife Fanny concede, in their sole but indeed interesting conversation on the subject, that Europeans are in significant ways estranged from

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nature; but they see their Amerindian hosts as being in their own way de-natured and, for all their good qualities, endowed with a comparable number of quite bad ones. “Quel est donc le sort d’une femme?” (What is, then, a woman’s fate?) bemoans Fanny later in the story, when she has come under suspicion of infidelity. “Unfortunate or culpable at the whim of men’s caprice, how is she rightly to know her duty, and seek security for her peace of mind?”5 We can almost imagine Julie d’Etange, of Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, voicing the same complaint, but here it suggests the un-Julie-like thought that the subordination of woman is an illogical consequence of contemporary civil norms. Obviously, had the same words come from the pen of Rousseau, they would have had nowhere near the same meaning; what is to Prévost a lamentable double standard, for Rousseau just goes to illustrate woman’s natural subordination and, correlatively, the feminine imperative of not only real virtue but also the untainted appearance of virtue. That men will sometimes judge women in grossly unfair ways is just part of the hand that Nature has dealt to men, to women, and to the difference between them. Still, Julie has a strength of character that many have admired, and which has been considered by many critics as overshadowing Saint Preux’s, if not Wolmar’s. Is there not a paradox in the fact that in Julie and in Emile, Rousseau paints at about the same time opposite descriptions of the domestic and social roles and possibilities of woman? Sophie is designed as a model complement to Emile, whose proper masculine role is to determine everything Sophie must be. In contrast, Julie, who is certainly not raised in the manner prescribed for Sophie, is not proposed as a model but as an example of a vulnerable young woman who, already on a slippery path when the story begins, achieves despite her grave fall a return to such sound principles that she becomes in the end the distaff voice of a comprehensive domestic and social philosophy based on woman’s free choice of order and virtue over passion and turmoil. The didactic intent is anything but ambiguous. Though it is thus abundantly clear that Sophie and Julie serve very different purposes, still we may plausibly wonder how the same author can have created them as in some ways parallel aspects of more or less the same general inspiration. One explanation is that the focus of Emile is, logically enough, Emile and not Sophie, whereas the focus of Julie is Julie. But then, any inferences to be drawn from the interconnections of the two works become somewhat mystifying. Is Emile, for example, with his ideal education, necessarily a better man than Wolmar? Can he construct

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a better household? Would Julie have loved him? Conversely, would either Saint Preux or Wolmar have loved Sophie? These questions, moot as they may be, nonetheless help put into relief the paradoxes we cannot avoid when we try to juxtapose Julie and Sophie. The enormous aesthetic and even moral tension between the two feminine models – the one bloodless and subservient, the other vibrant yet saintly – cannot but suggest a certain conflict between Rousseau’s own fundamentally divergent tendencies with respect to moral preachment and human gender solidarity. Sophie, who is innocent of Julie’s type of adolescent transgressions against the social order, represents woman as she should be; Julie does not. Yet Julie is the even more exalted example of what the woman redeemed can be, becoming herself an underpinning of the social order. But the social order, let us immediately note, is not about freedom – especially not, one might say in this context, for women. The social order is instead about commitment and duty, which are themselves to become sources of immense gratification and perhaps also of self-satisfaction. Beginning in Part iv, Julie is certainly very proud of what she has accomplished; but, just as she is enjoying the reward of her long sacrifices, her assurance (as we learn after the fact) really is crumbling so drastically that she must seek rescue in death: “un jour de plus, peut-être, et j’étais coupable” (one day more, perhaps, and I was undone).6 Certainly the notion of woman’s right to be free would have no meaning for Sophie, who was raised in the strict doctrine of submitting to her husband’s choices in everything that mattered. If woman is born to please and to be subjected to man, that is about the end of the game. “Sophie must be woman as Emile is man, in other words, possess all that befits the constitution of her species and her sex to fulfill her place in the physical and moral order.”7 But is Sophie any more a marionette than Emile? In contrast, Julie can be thought of as having freely subscribed – even if after being coerced – to the life she leads, in all its particulars. To that degree, while though subservient (but hardly servile), Julie is perhaps more directly comparable to Emile. Yet if it can be argued (and it has been) that Emile lives a mere illusion of liberty, invisibly fashioned of a thousand hidden constraints, then is this any less true of Julie? Women are not, in any event, at least according to Julie, inclined to take an interest in politics, especially because it would do them little good: I confess that politics is hardly in women’s purview … Neither is it, to speak to you frankly, the study to which I would give my preference; its utility is too removed from me to affect me much, and its light too sublime to dazzle my eyes.

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As I am obliged to love the government under which heaven caused me to be born, it matters little to me whether others are better.8

It is only with some abstraction that Jean Roussel is able to argue that “Julie’s voice, like [Rousseau’s], is that of freedom, of man’s fundamental rights, which the structures of society and the state must serve.”9 Now it must be noted that there is a curious counterpoint, of uncertain date, consisting of a Rousseau fragment in which female subordination appears to be merely institutional. “If women had as great a role as we in the disposition of business and the government of empires,” we there read, they might have achieved greater things than they have historically: Due allowance being made [toutes proportions gardées], women might have offered grander examples of greatness of character and love of virtue, and in greater number than men ever have, if our injustice had not deprived them, along with their liberty, of every opportunity of manifesting them to the world.10

Such victims of masculine injustice are nowhere to be found, however, in Julie or in Emile. By this time, Rousseau seems to be convinced that, precisely to the degree that women assert prerogatives that are properly masculine, they will contribute to the effemination of men – with the consequent loss of all cultural and social vigor. In the second half of the novel, Julie is of course not “Julie” anymore, she has become Madame de Wolmar, a distinction of which all the characters are constantly reminding us. Whereas Sophie has been predefined, Julie is allowed, as it were, to define, and develop into, her true self over a stretch of time. The once-defiant daughter becomes the dutiful wife and, more importantly, mother not just to her sons but to everyone: “Workers, household servants, all those who have served her even for a single day, all become her children.”11 Julie thus shares in the despotic power of the master as the moon shares that of the sun. Her absolute adjudication of the dismissal of servants stakes out for her a specific domain of real and moral authority. The underlying argument is that master and mistress exemplify equivalence with differentiation: “wife and husband are indeed destined to live together, but not in the same manner; they are to act in concert but not do the same things.”12 Julie’s mother, in contrast, is faulted by Julie herself for being “faible et sans autorité” (weak and without authority),13 although, on an affective plane, she often calls her “la meilleure des mères” (the best of mothers) and even “cette mère incomparable” (that incomparable mother). And we should not forget Rousseau’s stinging if paradoxical remark (in a footnote) to the effect that “Les deux amants sont à plaindre; la mère seule est

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inexcusable” (The two lovers are to be pitied; the mother alone is inexcusable).14 “Elle m’a trop aimée, elle m’a perdue” (She loved me too much, she was the cause of my downfall), asserts Julie:15 to be too loving is to love not enough; it is the failure to assume, or to assume with sufficient firmness, the grave responsibility of parental oversight and discipline. (Conveniently, this turn also shields Julie from ultimate responsibility: “songe au moins à ce qui t’excuse” (think at least on what exonerates you),16 Claire exhorts her.) Madame de Wolmar thinks, though certainly not at first, that she has, in effect, freely chosen her fate. Does Sophie think that she is free, or even that to be free would be desirable? Here we must not overlook the crucial fact that freedom is no more a matter of concern to Julie than it is to Sophie. For the question about Julie must be posed in the context of the overall philosophical structure of her world, and the story she stars in is not about freedom but about order, which necessarily limits freedom. That Sophie manages to act independently enough – at least in the corrupting ambiance of the big city – “souiller sa vertu” (to soil her virtue), as the text of Emile et Sophie puts it,17 is not meant to recommend her to our sympathies or admiration. Julie does almost the same thing,18 by the way, but out of weakness, not as an act of independence. Perhaps there is a tacit allusion here to the notion, not so muted in other writers, that only such constraints can rein in female sexuality. As Uzbek writes to Zachi in letter xix of the Lettres persanes: “You boast of a virtue that is not free; and your impure desires have perhaps nullified a thousand times over the merit and the value of that fidelity of which you so boast.”19 Some considered female lubricity the most important reason why wives needed to be confined, in which case a harem would seem perhaps not an entirely bad idea; for in the harem, Uzbek explains, a woman would benefit from “une heureuse impuissance de faillir” (a fortunate incapacity to fail).20 And maybe Sophie’s infidelity – which Emile attributes not so much to his own infidelity as to the margin it left for Sophie to stray – is similarly relevant. The Elysée garden and bird sanctuary could be taken as the token of Madame de Wolmar’s freedom, reflecting its limits. Within this space, she reigns – even, as it were, over nature. This is Julie’s own playground, where she can do everything at her own whim, without any real consequences for anyone. But this smaller domain is of course topologically circumscribed by the larger one that is Clarens. Elsewhere, Julie defers to her husband for all her principles. Julie represents specifically the voice of the domestic order; she has entered into the foundation of all the mansion’s

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institutions and can expound upon their theoretical justification. More specifically, besides being the final arbiter of the servants, she oversees the application of pedagogical as well as social principles with which, one presumes, Wolmar is in complete agreement. To live in an ordered society is to endorse the purposes of order itself, so as to derive the benefits it can provide. To be sure, one cannot evoke Clarens in properly political terms, for Clarens is not a polity but a property, and there is no reason to expect it to reflect the Social Contract, even if the two works belong in a sense to the same ideal world. While autonomous, Clarens is very much an ordered and hierarchized whole, where a different sort of contract applies, one which confers no form of political equality on women. Julie’s role within that order is definitively summarized by her: “Je suis femme et mère, je sais me tenir à mon rang” (I am a woman and a mother; I know my station).21 The mother is the complement of, and in no case a substitute for, the father. Thus the point for her is not to be free, but to be fully accomplished as materfamilias, and, indeed, in speaking about her children, she reveals that she sees her role as already almost fulfilled: she has prepared them to be educated but will not educate them herself. Saint Preux remarks further on that “le zèle maternel est actif, infatigable, et prévoyant” (a mother’s zeal is active, tireless, and proactive).22 With the sole exception of gender, such are exactly the characteristics of Emile’s preceptor. The components of an eternal ideal at Clarens rejoin in Saint Preux’s mind those of a forgotten, fallen past: “O times of love and innocence, when women were tender and modest, and men were simple and lived contentedly.”23 It goes without saying that, in a broad political sense – and leaving aside for a moment the gender hierarchy – women are as free as is the society as a whole. As passive citizens, but citizens all the same, they bene fit from all the securities and protection which the community affords to all. In this sense, when Rousseau refers to l’ homme (man) or les hommes (men), women are generically included. Thus, “L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers” (Man is born free and is everywhere in irons)24 obviously applies with equal force to men and women, and any remedy could only be identical in both cases. (There is not a single reference in the Social Contract to any civic role of women as differentiated from that of men.) Woman’s consent to her husband’s mastery cannot be equated with the utter estrangement of liberty which is condemned in the chapter on slavery in the Social Contract, and according to which “such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man; and denying all freedom of his will would deny all morality in his actions.”25 Women would thus

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seem to acquire a freedom analogous to that of the citizen under the social contract, the moral freedom of membership in a self-governing polity. Moreover, women in Rousseau would seem to be free in the psycho logical but not the political sense offered by the very reassurance that results from constraint, namely, that it frees them from worry. Freedom, a child psychologist once told me, est anxiogène: it generates anxiety. So it is that Emile, in Emile et Sophie, who has experienced some anxiety, can make the paradoxical assertion that he never felt so free as when he fell into slavery, for he was thus liberated from the risk of doing anything wrong. He says to his master, as Julie might to her husband, “We know how to bear the yoke of necessity which has subjected us to you.”26 Maybe Rousseau would say that to ask whether women, or even men, are free in our sense of the word is to ask the wrong question, and that the freedom that counts most is the kind defended by Saint Preux: Should a sophist [raisonneur] prove to me that I am not free, my inner sentiment, more powerful than all his arguments, constantly refutes them … To listen to such people, God himself would not be free, and that word freedom would have no meaning.27

That being so, the sophist would perhaps have to reply: well, in that case, freedom is whatever you choose to think it is. In like manner, a Julie or even a Sophie might consider that it is all in one’s attitude, and that no amount of specious (or even sound) reasoning can make a woman strain at her tether when her mind is at peace and her situation in keeping with the proper ways of nature. And insofar as it is clear in Rousseau’s thought that an equation of male and female is inherently unnatural, a woman cannot, in attempting to be free, wish or ask to be like a man. It may, then, be that, seeing herself as a woman fully empowered in her difference from man, she is in her own way as free as is he. No t e s 1 A. F. Prévost, Œuvres de Prévost, 8 vols. (Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1977–1986), vol. ii, pp. 201–2. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise indicated. 2 Prévost, Œuvres, vol. ii, pp. 202–3. 3 “Prévost est prêt à faire abstraction, dans toute la mesure du possible, de la différence des sexes,” G. May, Le Dilemme du roman au xviiie siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963), p. 238. 4 “La lecture des malheurs imaginaires de Cleveland, faite avec fureur et souvent interrompue, m’a fait faire, je crois, plus de mauvais sang que les miens.” Les

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Confessions, OC, vol. i, pp. 219–20. As Jean Sgard comments, with respect to the Rousseau–Prévost affinity, “Ce héros orphelin, vagabond, livré au monde, inquiet et maladroit, en proie aux inquiétudes amoureuses, religieuses, philosophiques, c’était lui. Cet affamé de passions, rongé par l’ennui, la mélancolie et la hantise de la mort, en 1737, c’était lui encore. Le mythe personnel de Jean-Jacques, pendant longtemps, s’est confondu avec celui de Cleveland et de Patrice.” J. Sgard, Prévost romancier (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1968), p. 534. Patrice is the narrator of Le Doyen de Killerine. 5 “Infortunée, coupable, au gré du caprice des hommes, où doit-elle prendre la règle de son devoir, et chercher de la sûreté pour son repos?” Prévost, Œuvres, vol. ii, p. 419. 6 Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, OC, vol. ii, p. 741. 7 Emile, ou de l’ éducation, OC, vol. iv, p. 692. 8 Julie, OC, vol. ii, p. 305. 9 J. Roussel, “La Nouvelle Héloïse et la politique,” in Lectures de La Nouvelle Héloïse, ed. by O. Mostefai (Ottawa: North American Association for the Study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1993), p. 72. He is referring specifically to statements of Julie about human rights on page 356 of Julie, OC, vol. ii. 10 Sur les femmes, OC, vol. ii, p. 1255. 11 Julie, OC, vol. ii, p. 444. 12 Julie, OC, vol. ii, p. 450. 13 Julie, OC, vol. ii, p. 39. 14 Julie, OC, vol. ii, p. 85. 15 Julie, OC, vol. ii, p. 94. 16 Julie, OC, vol. ii, p. 98. 17 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 887. 18 In letter 15 of part iii, where she proposes to continue her affair with Saint Preux after her marriage. 19 Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, ed. by P. Stewart and C. Volpilhac-Auger, Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, vol. i (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004). 20 Letter 24 (first edn., 1721); letter 26 in expanded edn. (1758). 21 Julie, OC, vol. ii, p. 458. 22 Julie, OC, vol. ii, p. 583. 23 Julie, OC, vol. ii, p. 604. 24 This is the first sentence of Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, p. 352. 25 Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, p. 356. 26 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 922. 27 Julie, OC, vol. ii, p. 683.

C h a p t e r 13

The subject and its body: love of oneself and freedom in the thought of Rousseau Mathieu Brunet and Bertrand Guillarme

We seek to illuminate Rousseau’s vision of freedom by examining it through the prism of the subject’s relationship with its own body. It is well known that, in Rousseau’s works, this relationship forms the basis for a central notion, that of amour de soi, or love of oneself. However, the specific mode of this phenomenon, which is both a feeling and a modality of one’s relationship to oneself, still remains to be defined. The question of the relationship between the subject and its body presents a choice between two alternatives (others are conceivable, but these two are essential): on the one hand, a proprietarist vision that still informs many discourses on freedom today (witness the feminist slogan “my body is mine”) and, on the other, a perspective according to which this relationship could or should be conceived of in a nondualistic fashion, a perspective that, in our view, is delineated by Rousseau. Such an interpretation clearly contradicts the most common and most classical readings of Rousseau’s work. Those readings tend, on the contrary, to underscore his “spontaneous dualism,”1 his affirmation of a Platonism reinterpreted through the lens of Cartesian and Christian thought, and the importance of the opposition between body and soul. However, we believe that a nondualist interpretation is fruitful and well founded. Most of the passages in which Rousseau proclaims a clear-cut dichotomy between soul and body are couched within a religious or metaphysical context (especially when death is evoked as a form of deliverance). As for the pair formed by the heart and the body, it does not seem to us to function as an opposition. It is to this pair that we would like to turn our attention. Du t i e s t o on e s e l f The first indication that Rousseau rejects the proprietarist conception of the body lies in his affirmations, whether explicit or implicit, that a free 216

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being has duties to himself. If Rousseau thus enunciates an entire series of limits, as well as prescriptions regarding the use that a subject may make of its own body, this is because he conceives of the subject’s relationship to its body in terms other than those of ownership. If I owned my body, I would be free to do as I please with it. Ownership of self: Locke and Rousseau Ownership of self is a Lockean notion, or at any rate one that is elaborated by Locke, specifically, in his Second Treatise of Civil Government.2 This notion asserts a relation of ownership between the self and the body it inhabits. To say that an individual “owns” himself implies a distance between the possessor and the object of its possession, the mind and the body. This thesis is central to Locke’s moral and political thought, because the fact that I possess myself allows him to deduce that I am also able to appropriate external objects by mixing the labor of my body with natural resources. Ownership of self, which expresses a particularly pronounced form of dualism, is the basis for ownership of things. This relationship between ownership of self and ownership of things closely corresponds to what Isaiah Berlin has described as a negative form of liberty, in his famous text “Two Concepts of Liberty.”3 I am negatively free if others do not interfere with my choices. Briefly put, to be free in the negative sense is to be free from the interference of others in the pursuit of activities that one is capable, within a given culture, of performing without their help. It means being free to think what one likes, say what one thinks, go where one wishes, associate with anyone who is inclined to associate with us, and so on and so forth. Conversely, I am positively free if I am my own master. This implies more than being free from external obstacles created by others’ interference. It involves being free from internal obstacles as well, such as weakness, instinct, ignorance, and the like. The loss of negative liberty paves the way for a theory of dependence. The loss of positive liberty calls for a theory of alienation. It is a strength of Rousseau – and later of Karl Marx – to have articulated both. One of the dimensions of this opposition between two concepts of liberty concerns the types of norm with which they are associated. Negative freedom gives rise only to rights, that is, protections from possible interference by others. Positive freedom, by contrast, also implies prohibitions, imperatives, and duties. We will come back to this issue later on, without, however, pretending to offer an exhaustive or chronological reading of Rousseau’s work. Instead, we will highlight a certain number of examples

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that we regard as significant. In our view, these imperatives are based on a vision of liberty as self-realization, a vision that Rousseau sets forth, for example, in his depiction of the state of nature. Certainly, natural man is also negatively free, in the sense that he is shielded from any interaction with others. However, this first form of liberty is completed by a second, more essential, form. In the state of nature, writes Rousseau in the Second Discourse, one has “the advantage of constantly having all of one’s strength at one’s disposal, of always being ready for any event, and of always carrying oneself, so to speak, entirely with one” (“de se porter pour ainsi dire toujours tout entier avec soi”). In another passage at the end of the same Discourse: “the Savage lives within himself; the sociable man, always outside of himself, knows how to live only in the opinion of others; and it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence.”4 These two formulations – carrying oneself entirely with one and living within oneself – should be understood literally, as ruling out any distanced relationship whatsoever, including that of appropriation. It is no accident that love of oneself (amour de soi), which is characteristic of natural man, is opposed to self-love (amour propre), which characterizes the distanced relationship to self of the social subject. Discussions of suicide A certain number of passages on suicide in Rousseau’s works illustrate his rejection of the proprietarist thesis regarding the subject’s relationship to its body and his refusal to limit the definition of liberty to the latter’s negative version. Since the publication of Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, Saint Preux’s famous letter at the end of Part iii (sec. 21) has often been read as an attempt to justify suicide. There, Saint Preux develops an entire series of arguments organized around two principal poles. First, I own my body and therefore have the right to do with it as I please. Second, it is not a crime against God to cast my body aside, because that body is “nothing in God’s eyes.” The latter argument, which is based on an opposition between body and soul, seems somewhat specious. It effectively implies that the problem has already been partially resolved, since, in God’s eyes, only the soul has existence or value, so that mastery of one’s body is reduced to a purely human question. Hence, we will focus our attention on the first of these aspects. The thesis that Saint Preux develops is precisely that of ownership of self: What do our Sophists say about this? First of all they regard life as something that is not ours, because it has been given to us; but it is precisely because it has


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been given to us that it is ours. Did God not give them two arms? Yet when they fear gangrene they have one cut off, and both, if need be. Precisely the same holds for anyone who believes in the immortality of the soul; for if I sacrifice my arm to preserve something more precious which is my body, I sacrifice my body to preserve something more precious which is my well-being.5

According to Saint Preux, then, the ownership of self, which is a gift from God, demands the preservation of one’s individual well-being. The conclusion Saint Preux draws from this hypothesis is that suicide is an expression of negative freedom, that is, exclusively a matter of the agent’s personal decision, with which the interests or wishes of others may not interfere. Admittedly, he notes, “there are duties towards others, which do not allow every man to dispose of himself,”6 but since he himself has no such duties, he concludes that God has given him ownership of himself in order to serve his own interests: God has not breathed life into him [man] in order for him to remain immobile in a perpetual quietism. But he has given him freedom to do good, conscience to will it, and reason to choose it. He has constituted him sole judge of his own acts. He has written in his heart: do what is good for you and harmful to no one.7

It should be pointed out that the good that Saint Preux mentions is not an impersonal value but refers only to his own well-being. However, it is impossible to consider this letter without discussing the twofold reaction it provokes, that of Rousseau in a note to the text, and Milord Edward’s more extended reaction in the reply he writes to Saint Preux. Rousseau’s commentary underscores the ambiguity and artificiality of Saint Preux’s discourse: The strange letter for the deliberation in question! Does one reason so peacefully over such a question, when one examines it for oneself? Is the letter a fabrication, or does the Author want nothing more than to be refuted?8

Thus, Rousseau seems to read this long apology for suicide as a kind of rhetorical attempt to ward off death. For Rousseau, then, this would be a manner of dissociating himself from this position of distanced deliberation regarding the subject’s own possible suicide, which is one of the hallmarks of the proprietarist conception of the subject’s relationship to its body. Edward’s response is more fully developed, and his argument against the right to commit suicide can be broken up into several segments. He begins by acknowledging that there are a number of situations in which suicide is permitted. It must be underscored, however, that precisely these

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specific situations are designed to contest the proprietarist thesis. The first case he mentions is that of incurable physical illness: excruciating bodily pain, when it is incurable, may justify a man’s disposing of himself: for all his faculties being estranged by pain, and the evil being without remedy, he no longer has the use of either his will or his reason; he ceases to be a man before he dies, and by taking his own life merely completes the separation from a body that bogs him down and where already his soul no longer is.9

In this case, suicide is something quite different from a resolution regarding one’s personal well-being, authorized by one’s ownership of oneself. On the contrary, this argument insists on the union between the subject and its body, on the integrity of the subject, which authorizes suicide when it comes undone. The second case in which Edward acknowledges the legitimacy of suicide is that which is traditionally illustrated by the great figures of Antiquity (Cato, Brutus, et al.), whom Saint Preux has already invoked. Edward seeks to show how this course of action is permitted, indeed required, by the quest to realize oneself through the defense or promotion of a moral or impersonal value. Thus, far from involving a right to one’s personal well-being, to protection against the interference of others, suicide is rooted in one’s duty toward oneself and others, in the obligation to be virtuous: You try to justify yourself with examples. You dare to cite me Romans! You, Romans! Some right you have to dare pronounce those illustrious names! Tell me, did Brutus die a desperate lover, and did Cato rip out his entrails for his mistress? Petty, feeble man, what is shared between Cato and you? Show me the common measure between that sublime soul and yours … Know that a death such as you contemplate is dishonorable and devious. It is a larceny committed against mankind. Before you take your leave of it, give it back what it has done for you … Have you not learned that you could not take a step on earth without finding some duty to fulfill, and that every man is useful to humanity, by the very fact that he exists?10

In none of the other situations can the option of suicide be justified, and Edward refutes Saint Preux’s arguments one by one. The latter’s silence and his willingness to go on the journey that Edward advises him to make are a sign – in the economy of the novel – that he has abandoned the option of suicide. However, the latter reappears at an important point in the novel, at the end of Part iv, in the guise of the double suicide of lovers. After the pilgrimage to Meillerie, in the little boat that is taking the lovers back to Clarens, Saint Preux is deeply upset by the loss of


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the “happy times” of the past.11 At this point, he is seized by a “horrible temptation”: Soon I began to turn over lethal designs in my mind, and in a transport it makes me shudder to think about, I was violently tempted to hurl her with me into the waves, and there in her arms put an end to my life and to my long torments.12

This temptation is immediately averted, however, by his realization of the true implications of the value of love. At first, the possibility of suicide is motivated by a desire to promote his individual well-being, but then it is immediately rejected (Saint Preux has clearly internalized Edward’s advice) and is replaced by a communion of hearts brought about with the help of nature (the tears, shed independently by both Saint Preux and Julie, which drop into the lake). This communion – unlike suicide – allows for the fulfillment of a value, in this case, that of love. To the extent that they contribute to full self-realization, these ways of justifying or rejecting the possibility of suicide are expressions of a positive form of the subject’s liberty. This virtuous deliberation, which permits one to realize oneself and hence one’s liberty as well, is never cool or calculating. On the contrary, it is always accompanied by intense emotions, without which liberty would be impossible. L i be r t y a n d a f f e c t The negation of the proprietarist thesis is not the only way in which the relationship between the subject and its body helps to illuminate Rousseau’s conception of positive liberty. If we take the integrity (or unity) of the subject and its body as given, we can imagine two different ways for the subject to manage its duties. The first, which we might describe as “Kantian,” accords primacy to reason. It is by means of rational exercise that I can define my duties to myself and others and attempt to carry them out. The second, which one might describe as “sensuous,” is the one that seems to be privileged by Rousseau. Since Rousseauian liberty presupposes the unity of the thinking subject and its body (to be free is to “carry oneself entirely with one”), and since that unity is conditioned by the sensualistic logic to which Rousseau subscribes, the experience of (or desire to experience) liberty takes place time and again in the sensuous arena. Liberty and the feeling of love A common reading of La Nouvelle Héloïse, and one that does find support in the novel, consists in highlighting an economy of love that is rooted

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in a division between the heart and the body. According to this reading, La Nouvelle Héloïse is based on a dualistic structure – Cartesian and/or Christian – that opposes the soul, as the seat of virtue, to the body, as the seat of desires contrary to that virtue. Right from the very beginning of the novel, at the first signs of a dawning feeling of love, Julie declares to her lover: my too tender heart needs love, but … my senses have no need of a lover. Imagine, you who love virtue, with what joy I made this happy discovery. Relieved of the profound infamy into which my terror had plunged me, I savor the delightful pleasure of loving in all purity. This state makes my life’s happiness; it benefits my temper and my health; I can scarcely conceive a more blissful one, and the harmony of love and innocence is paradise on earth to me.13

And, indeed, in the letters of the first two parts of the novel, when faced with the outbursts of her lover’s desire, Julie regularly attempts to reestablish this virtuous “innocence.” But this vision of love as divided into pure feeling and impure desire is – as Julie herself admits – an effect of the education she has received: “I was reared in accordance with maxims so severe that the purest love appeared to me the height of dishonor.”14 Here, we would like to defend a different reading of La Nouvelle Héloïse, close to that of, for example, Jean Ehrard,15 which presents a radica lly different vision of love as engaging both the soul and the body, and as rebelling against the supposedly virtuous imperative of sublimation. In this reading, which we present here only in broad outline, the ideas of happiness and liberty are based on this union of body and soul, on the return of the body as the basis of the subject’s liberation and the possibility of its happiness. Rousseau writes in Emile: “Justice and goodness are not merely abstract words – pure moral beings formed by the understanding – but are true affections of the soul enlightened by reason.”16 The same judgment would certainly apply to liberty. We will now point out a few important landmarks of this reading of La Nouvelle Héloïse, which refuses the preeminence of dualism. The first “trial of the senses” encountered by the lovers is that of the kiss in the bower (in Part i, letter 14). This kiss reveals to Saint Preux the dichotomy between virtue and desire, and it brings about an alienation of the subject (“I am no longer the same, and no longer see you the same”),17 as well as the first separation of the lovers (in Letter 15). And yet, even in response to this very first trial, the feeling described by Saint Preux is neither “fright” nor alienation but, on the contrary, that of a fleeting experience of the coherence of the self: “every part of me came together under that delightful touch.”18 As if echoing this first indication of the


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unity of the subject that love may help one to rediscover, Julie later invites her lover to share her bed. “Come then, soul of my heart, life of my life, come be reunited with yourself.”19 At this moment, Julie believes – and she will continue to believe this until her death – in the necessity of a true and full love, one that is able to “grant everything to desire without compromising modesty”: “the heart does not follow the senses, it guides them; it throws over their ecstasies a delightful veil.”20 “Neither prudish nor persnickety,”21 it may be that Julie, despite appearances, clearly recognizes the importance of sexual desire in the fulfillment of love. If this is the case, then the therapy organized by Wolmar at Clarens is extremely dangerous, not so much because it threatens to reawaken the lovers’ feelings – which Julie herself has never disavowed22 – but rather because, by thwarting the carnal temptation, it rouses as well as dooms it. On the pilgrimage to Meillerie, which results in the temptation of double suicide mentioned above, Julie ceases to have any illusions regarding her capacity for resistance: Julie … had taken fright and seized my hand, clutched it silently, looking at me tenderly and barely holding back a sigh; then all of a sudden turning away her eyes and pulling me by the arm: “let us go from here, my friend, she said with trembling voice, the air in this place is not good for me.”23

From this point on, her struggle to remain faithful to the “virtue” demanded of her by marriage is doomed to end in death. And here we agree with Ehrard’s analysis of Julie’s death (“one day more, perhaps, and I was criminal!” she declares in the posthumous letter to her lover),24 which rejects any metaphysical reading of this passage. What Julie dies of is an impossible love, which would engage both the soul and the body. What her death communicates is the unity of her being, the inauthenti city of the sublimation imposed on her by Clarens (and exemplified by the substitution of Claire’s body for Julie’s in Julie’s crazy scheme to unite her lover with her cousin). In addition, it expresses the ideal of a total love that is also an ideal of liberty, because it realizes humanity’s true nature. When one reads Rousseau’s novel from this perspective, one is forced to acknowledge that its ideal postulate is not necessarily virtuous sublim ation (such an ideal would be perfectly attainable, at least within the sterile framework of Clarens, but it would be wholly a product of social conventions that destroy the subject’s unity and subjugate its liberty). Rather, the novel’s ideal is a destruction of the social opposition or separation of soul and body. The union of the lovers, with its fusion of hearts and bodies, is an image of the original subject’s lost and desired transparency. True love is the social expression of the desire for self-realization. Or, to put it

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differently, it is especially in the love relationship that positive liberty is expressed and experienced in the world of society. “As long as one desires one can do without happiness … The land of illusions is on the earth the only one worth living in,” writes Julie in her final letter.25 And this is why, in Rousseau’s work, the discourse on liberty repeatedly takes a lyrical form as the expression of this affect. Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse is surely the best philosophical text on liberty that there could possibly be. Liberty and solitude: the reverie There is at least one other experience, less fanciful than that of ideal love, in which Rousseau, on numerous occasions, rediscovers a feeling of plenitude and self-realization. That experience is absorption in nature and the reverie to which such absorption gives rise. From the Confessions to the Rêveries, there are numerous passages in which Rousseau describes absorption of this kind – whether walking (in the Confessions IV), drifting on a lake in a small boat, or contemplating the water of a lake (in the “Fifth Promenade”) – as the precondition for experiencing a feeling of plenitude and absolute existence. “Never have I thought so much, existed so much, lived so much, been myself so much, if I dare to speak this way, as in these travels I have made alone and on foot.”26 It is clear that these privileged moments are characterized above all by a direct contact between the subject in its body and nature, by an absence of mediation between nature and man, presenting the subject with an image of the state of nature. This image, in turn, gives rise to a twofold feeling of liberty. First, it produces a feeling of negative liberty, liberation from dependence: the sight of the countryside, the succession of pleasant views, the open air, the big appetite, the good health that I gain while walking, the freedom of the tavern, the distance from everything that recalls my situation to me, all this disengages my soul.27

But this first feeling is followed by a second one, in which the subject’s liberty expresses itself in its positive form, as the attainment of plenitude and the realization of the true self, an experience that Rousseau does not hesitate to describe as a “sentiment of existence”: What do we enjoy in such a situation? Nothing external to ourselves, nothing if not ourselves and our own existence. As long as this state lasts, we are sufficient unto ourselves, like God. The sentiment of existence, stripped of any other emotion, is in itself a precious sentiment of contentment and of peace.28


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What is at issue here is literally the overcoming of that social alienation that makes one feel like a stranger to oneself. N e g at i v e l i be r t y / p o s i t i v e l i be r t y: t h e v i r t uous c i rc l e Rousseau provides a well-known political solution to the specific problem of social dependence. How can the negative liberties of the subjects be guaranteed within a context of interdependence? Rousseau’s response is based on the possibility of the individual’s moral transformation. If every individual is motivated by a general will and no longer by a particular one, and if the political society carries out that general will, then each individual acquires a civil liberty equivalent to his natural independence. In our view, this moral transformation is only possible if the subjects have acquired a positive form of liberty. Only if they are “carrying themselves entirely with them” – that is, disalienated – will they be able to know themselves and hence to know and to will the common good. This overcoming of alienation may be divided into two phases. First of all, for ordinary mortals, the attainment of plenitude is made possible by overcoming the situation of dependence. The society that is well regulated by a general will is a society of equals, in which others’ opinions no longer govern my existence by means of comparison, jealousy, and discord. This well-regulated society is opposed to that in which man, “always outside of himself, knows how to live only in the opinion of others; and it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence.”29 Both on the civic and the interpersonal planes, it is a complete and fully satisfied love that liberates the feeling of love of oneself.30 But this condition is not sufficient. Only a few great souls are capable of overcoming alienation by themselves. The radical difference that Rousseau displays and to which he lays claim (“I am not made like any of the ones I have seen; I dare to believe that I am not made like any that exist”)31 stems above all from his capacity for existence, and it explains his positive liberty. It is also what enables him to perceive and to know the common good, and to will its realization: “Natural commiseration … no longer dwells in any but a few great Cosmopolitan Souls, who … following the example of the sovereign Being who created them, include the whole human Race in their benevolence.”32 Thus, the great soul’s feeling of existence and benevolence are the precise social counterparts of the natural feelings of love of oneself and pity. Not only are they the equivalents of these, but the same type of

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relationship exists between them. The role of these great souls is thus to guide the others. Rousseau observes in the Second Discourse that freedom’s “value is felt only as long as one enjoys [it] oneself, and the taste for [it] is lost as soon as one has lost [it].”33 Thus, in order to revive this taste and avert an irreversible denaturation, it is necessary to restore a trace of the original liberty. This liberty is lost forever, like the statue of Glaucus. And its restoration can only occur by the sensuous means of evocation; this liberty can only be felt, evoked by representations that appeal to the heart, whether by showing the disasters produced by excessive self-love (amour propre), as in Narcisse ou l’amant de lui-même, or by imagining human beings in keeping with the heart and in harmony with nature.34 Self-realization is not the product of rational reflection but of the resurgence of a natural affect. For this reason, it is brought about more by images that move us than by arguments that convince us. The function of Rousseau’s eloquence, and of the sensuousness and sensitivity of his writing, is above all to serve as an appeal in this sense, to reawaken our affects and our taste for liberty.35 No t e s 1 H. Gouhier, Les Méditations métaphysiques de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: Vrin, 1970). 2 J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 3 I. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). 4 J.-J. Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England), vol. iii, pp. 21, 66. 5 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 311 n4. 6 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 314. 7 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 315. 8 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 316. 9 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 320. 10 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, pp. 322–3. 11 “It is over, I was saying to myself, those times, those happy times are no more; they have vanished forever.” Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 427. 12 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 428. 13 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 41. 14 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 41. 15 J. Ehrard, “Le Corps de Julie,” in L’Invention littéraire au XVIIIe siècle: fictions, idées, société (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 101–16.


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16 J.-J. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. by A. Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 235. 17 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 52. 18 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 52. 19 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 119, emphasis added. 20 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 113. 21 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 114. 22 “Your Julie will always be yours, she will always love you” (“Julie, or the New Heloise,” p. 275); “Is it not preferable to purify a sentiment so dear in order to make it durable?” (“Julie, or the New Heloise,” p. 299). 23 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 427. 24 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 609. 25 Rousseau, “Julie, or the New Heloise,” in Collected Writings, vol. vi, p. 569. 26 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 136. 27 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 136. 28 Rousseau, “Reveries of the Solitary Walker,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 46 n4. 29 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 66. 30 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 47. 31 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 5. 32 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 54. 33 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 57. 34 “Go to Vevey, visit the country, look over the landscape, take an excursion on the lake, and say whether nature has not made this fine country for a Julie, a Claire, and a Saint Preux; but do not look for them there” (“Confessions,” p. 128). 35 Needless to say, this essay resonates with contemporary interpretations of Rousseau’s ideas on art, especially those on music (see Tracy B. Strong’s chapter in this volume) and painting (see, especially, R. Démoris, “Boucher, Diderot, Rousseau,” in Rethinking Boucher, ed. by M. Hyde and M. Ledbury (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), pp. 201–28).

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Ch apter 14

Paranoia and freedom in Rousseau’s final decade Leo Damrosch

In this essay I want to consider the problem of psychological freedom in Rousseau’s largely neglected final decade – neglected, first, because the Confessions stops short of it and, in the Anglophone world, because Maurice Cranston, author of the standard biography in English, died before he could cover it. By “psychological freedom,” I mean an inter ior consciousness, a sentiment de liberté closely related to le sentiment de l’existence that Rousseau celebrates so eloquently in the Confessions and the Reveries; and I’ll bring forward a number of passages from the Reveries and from the Dialogues (or Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques) that carry very different implications from the ones critics usually emphasize. Most discussions of “freedom” or “liberty” in Rousseau – the words are more or less synonymous in English – have centered on the paradoxes of liberté politique, with Rousseau’s notorious declaration that anyone who resists the volonté générale must be coerced: “on le forçera d’être libre.” But, since the focus in the Social Contract is on replacing natural liberty with civil liberty, insofar as psychology is addressed at all, it is in a collective context, encouraging belief in the moi commun, and in a factitious civil religion that may not be literally “true” but serves to reconcile citizens to their duties. From the point of view of individual psychology, Emile, published at the same period in Rousseau’s life, is more relevant. Here, too, are paradoxes. The boy (whose name might well be Jean-Jacques) is permitted to act with complete freedom, but he does so in accordance with a scenario cunningly supervised by the tutor (whose name might well be Rousseau); so he is at one and the same time a free agent and a behaviorist subject. It is as if he were living out the great scroll up above in Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, with the tutor as author of the scroll. And even this specialized mode of freedom is reserved for the male sex. When it comes time to discuss girls, Rousseau declares, “They have, or should have, very little 231

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liberty … Do not permit a single instant in their lives when they’re not aware of the bridle.”1 But, after all, it is only to be expected that freedom in Emile should take constraint for granted, since the boy is being prepared to become a father and a citizen, and when he grows up he will have to surrender even the ambiguous mode of autonomy that he had as a child. From then on, he will live and act within the pale of what John Stuart Mill called “Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legit imately exercised by society over the individual.” Rousseau has a formulation in the Letters Written from the Mountain that sounds a good deal like Mill’s: “Liberty consists less in acting according to one’s own will than in not submitting to anyone else’s.”2 Yet, even in Emile, Rousseau distinguishes between civil liberty and a deeper and more intimate kind, which is sometimes referred to as “liberté morale” and might better be called psychological or even existential liberty. “It’s in vain,” he says flatly, “that we aspire to liberty under the safeguard of the laws … Liberty resides in no form of government, it is in the heart of the free man, and he carries it everywhere with him.”3 In a valuable essay, Marc Eigeldinger brings out the foundational status of this mode of liberty in Rousseau’s existential psychology: “Liberty is apprehended first of all as a feeling, an interior evidence, arising from the very roots of one’s being.”4 So let’s approach the question from a different direction. If in any form whatsoever of civil liberty the chains of society remain in place, then, as Rousseau says at the beginning of the Social Contract, the best that can be hoped for is to legitimate them. The general will is not necessarily good, or even (in any absolute sense) right. It is a will, and its virtue is simply that it is general. “On le forçera d’être libre” is not so outrageously paradoxical as it is sometimes assumed to be. The kind of freedom imposed by even the most democratic state cannot allow its members to have complete autonomy, and it has been well said that if Rousseau had grown up in a Rousseauian state, he would have run away at the age of 16. Indeed, after 1763, the Citizen of Geneva was no longer a citizen of any place, increasingly committed to what Isaiah Berlin, in Two Concepts of Liberty, calls “inner emigration,” the time-honored Stoic and Christian retreat into an interior citadel. Berlin describes this tactic in terms that are highly appropriate to Rousseau: I wish to be master of my kingdom, but my frontiers are long and insecure, therefore I contract them in order to reduce or eliminate the vulnerable area. I eliminate the obstacles in my path by abandoning the path.5

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In Rousseau’s variant of this position, a number of traditional strands are interwoven, or entangled, in a highly personal way. As Paul Hoffmann shows in an essay, “La Liberté de l’âme heureuse,” Rousseau makes the claim that the mind can choose voluntarily to be happy, and thereby free; this position derives from the Stoic concept of transforming weakness into strength by an act of will, and from the Augustinian concept that the will is oriented essentially toward the good. But since Augustine believed this was impossible without an infusion of unmerited grace, Hoffmann adds that Rousseau is a very pelagian Augustinian – yet another oxymoron to add to the seemingly endless catalogue.6 And certainly in the “Profession of Faith” in Emile Rousseau takes a basically Augustinian line, stressing a radical dualism between the compulsion of bodily passions (or, stated theologically, the fallen flesh) and the freedom of spirit that resists and disavows the passions.7 Many of the philosophers of the Enlightenment were materialists who rejected any dualism of mind and matter, much less of spirit and flesh, and they were also determinists who held that every single event that occurs, mental events included, is the inevitable consequence of preceding causes. In support of these convictions they arrayed a wide range of arguments, from the radical empiricism of the Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature to the imaginative flights of Denis Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream. But I believe that, at the deepest level, thinkers argue for or against determinism not for logical reasons, but for temperamental ones. The optimistic, gregarious Diderot and David Hume enjoyed believing that there is no such thing as free will, a belief which – like Marxist historical determinism in a later era – empowered a heady sense of participating in irresistible changes for the better. Emotionally troubled personalities such as Rousseau or Samuel Johnson, all too aware of unwanted, compulsive, irrational behavior, could not afford to believe in determinism. So, for them, it came down to sentiment, not proof, and, as Johnson remarked to James Boswell, “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it.”8 So here is one paradox more: the sentiment de liberté is at war with a very threatening intuition of unfreedom, an overwhelming sense of compulsion, of living out patterns that are neither chosen nor desired. The most dangerous kind of unfreedom comes not from without but from within, and deep down Rousseau must have been haunted by the suspicion that Thomas Hobbes might be right: even if we are free to do what we want, we are not free to want what we want.

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It is surely with justice that a psychoanalyst observes in Rousseau a repetition compulsion, condemning himself repeatedly to exile, generating irrational quarrels with friends as well as enemies, and enduring humiliations that he brings upon himself.9 It is no wonder that Rousseau speaks so often in the Confessions of being subject to a mysterious and irresistible destinée. Only once, to my knowledge – in the context of finding himself among the youthful converts to Catholicism in Turin – does he acknowledge that he might actually be the author of his own fate: “I groaned at the fate [sort] that had brought me there, as if that fate hadn’t been my own doing.”10 But, even if he is indeed the author of his actions, their source seems to lie in some inaccessible hinterland of the self – what today would be called the unconscious, but for which eighteenth-century thought had no adequate concept at all. Writing the Confessions and reliving the past, Rousseau was repeatedly brought up short by episodes in which his behavior seemed involuntary, and even inexplicable. A good example is the concert he attempted to give at Lausanne, where he had found himself at the age of 18 and was passing himself off as a music teacher, even though he knew almost nothing of music. Not only that, he was calling himself Vaussore de Villeneuve in homage to a raffish traveling musician, Venture de Villeneuve, with whom he had been smitten in Annecy. The soi-disant Vaussore assembled an orchestra to perform a piece he had composed, but when he raised his baton a fearful cacophony burst forth. His utter incompetence was revealed, and the musicians amused themselves by scraping as harshly as possible, while the audience covered their ears. Sweating and all but paralyzed with embarrassment, Rousseau forced himself to keep going, until the end of the piece completed the disaster. He had inserted an engaging minuet tune that Venture had taught him, which he was able to remember thanks to the obscene words that went with it, and it turned out that he wasn’t the only one who knew the words. The audience exploded in laughter, and assured him that his work would be sung everywhere. The whole experience, although recounted with ironic detachment in the Confessions, must have been ghastly at the time. Evidently Rousseau expected to somehow absorb Venture’s mana by impersonating him; he admits that he was “so to speak venturisé.”11 Jean Starobinski brings out well the strange passivity with which Rousseau so often relied on the current to carry him along: What began as an act of will continued as a sort of hypnosis, in which it was simply a matter of permitting whatever the role of “Vaussore” demanded to be


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done. One may speak here of magical thinking, since magic consists precisely in inducing forces that one allows thereafter to act upon oneself.12

Freud, of course, would add that it was no accident that the sexually repressed teenager borrowed his tune from a dirty song. On at least one other occasion, when he was 25, Rousseau impulsively adopted an alias, though with happier results: calling himself an English Jacobite named Dudding during a long stagecoach journey, he enjoyed a brief but intoxicating liaison on the road with an older woman named Madame de Larnage. Yet here, too, was a paradox: in feeling free, he was yielding to the masterful control of someone else, and the alias reflected a sense of liberation from his usual self. He says flatly in the Confessions, “I was no longer the same man.”13 Those were brief experiences, but another period of role-playing is more significant, since it came in his maturity and lasted fully six years. After the famous epiphany on the road to Vincennes, when the idea for the first Discourse came to him like a revelation, Rousseau gave away his watch and fancy clothes, adopted the persona of a truth-telling prophet, and was suddenly transformed from a tongue-tied blunderer into a social lion. As he later recalled that time, the role was so comfortable that it didn’t even feel like a role: “I wasn’t acting a part; I became in reality what I seemed.”14 When he afterwards came to break with the philosophes, and to regard their whole project as symptomatic of the wrong course civilization had taken, he then had to make sense of his own complicity in their project. With his experiences as a writer and celebrity in the foreground, Rousseau now found a comprehensive explanation for his lifelong intu ition of unfreedom, so antithetical to the longed-for sentiment de liberté. And this was the systematic delusion of a complot, a Europe-wide conspiracy directed by unseen enemies whose agents were everywhere and who could turn even the most innocent encounter into a diabolic trap. As early as his twenties, when he was living as an obscure tutor in Lyons, Rousseau had begun speaking about feeling persecuted, and of course the expulsions from France and then Switzerland in the 1760s, when he really was persecuted, encouraged his tendency to paranoia. Isolated and frightened in England, he became convinced that David Hume was insidiously destroying him, and after he fled back to France and was shut up by the Prince de Conti in a remote chateau, the fantasies intensified further. By the time he got out of there and took refuge in the Dauphiné, he was certain that the ceiling had eyes and the walls had ears, as he said when he began the second part of the Confessions. And it was at that point – in

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1769, seven years after the Social Contract, and two years after leaving England – that he hit upon a comprehensive narrative that is worth reviewing in some detail. It is in the strange “Letter to Saint-Germain” that he composed during a brutally cold winter in an isolated farmhouse, tormented by psychosomatic symptoms such as often attacked him at times of high anxiety. The story, as Rousseau now understood it, went like this. His duplicitous friends the Baron Grimm and Diderot had originally intended to coach him to write wicked books in order to blacken his reputation, but he escaped from their clutches (and his would-be patron Madame d’Epinay’s) and was taken up by the Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg. His enemies’ countermove, working through Prime Minister Choiseul, was to engineer the denunciation of Emile by the Parlement de Paris. With the Luxembourgs’ help, he escaped yet again, and found a new protector in Frederick the Great’s administrator in Neuchâtel, Maréchal Keith. This time, working through Voltaire, his enemies got him expelled from Switzerland and isolated in England under the supervision of Hume. Yet again he managed to get away, and the Prince de Conti hid him at Trye, but there, too, they were able to goad him into leaving. Most diabolically of all, they had formed a plan to associate him with the would-be assassin Robert François Damiens, whose notorious attempt on the king’s life occurred at the very time of some missing letters which Rousseau believed – mistakenly, as it turned out – to have been mysteriously removed from his files. The implication was plain: the letters had been stolen so that they could be replaced with documents that would implicate him in the assassination attempt, and these would be released to the public when the moment was ripe for his destruction. The fantasy of a complot had thus developed into something like a literary plot, elaborated by Rousseau’s novelistic imagination and projected onto the world around him. Eventually he could stand it no longer, and insisted, against Conti’s strong urging, on returning to Paris, where he expected to confront his enemies. They failed to appear, and the authorities seemed to have no interest in reviving the arrest warrant that was still in force. At this point, Rousseau had either to abandon the idea of the complot or sophisticate it further, and that is exactly what he did: the very invisibility of his persecutors proved the insidiousness of their scheme, and their goal must have been to kill him by inches instead of putting him out of his misery all at once. From this late period, in the 1770s, we have the Dialogues, which are at times paranoid to an almost frightening degree. Perhaps the most


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distressing passage is the one that dramatizes an absolute helplessness, like Gulliver immobilized by the tiny ropes of the Lilliputians: Picture to yourself people who begin by each putting on a closely fitting mask, arming themselves to the teeth, and who then take their enemy by surprise, seizing him from behind. They strip him naked, and they tie up his body, arms, hands, feet, and head so that he can no longer move. They put a gag in his mouth; they blind his eyes; they lay him out on the ground; and, in short, they spend their noble lives murdering him gently, for fear that if he dies of his wounds, he will stop feeling them too soon.15

Similarly, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, unfinished at the time of Rousseau’s death, are pervaded by claims of total isolation in a hostile world. “Me voici donc seul sur la terre”16 the first Promenade begins – “So here I am, alone on the earth” – with a donc that implies a preceding survey of evidence for which this is the conclusion. It continues, “Les voilà donc étrangers” (They are now foreign, unknown, and nothing to me, since that’s how they wanted it). Françoise Barguillet notes the eloquent parallelism of “me voici” and “les voilà.”17 As the first Promenade goes on, Rousseau’s status of social nonentity is endorsed in a willed rejection of other people, and even of the world: “Tout ce qui m’est extérieur m’est étranger désormais” (Everything external to me is from now on foreign to me).18 Starobinski emphasizes the purposive quality of “désormais” (henceforth): Rousseau can feel free only by entirely eliding the other. The word appears again a little later: “Désormais I am nothing among mankind, and that’s all that I can be, no longer having any real relationship with them, any true society.”19 Highlighting passages such as these, Starobinski builds a case for a Rousseau whose ineradicable sense of guilt is relieved only by projecting it outside the self, falling back meanwhile on a total passivity that seems self-indulgent and escapist. “Persecution,” Starobinski writes in his chapter on the subject, “seems to answer to a secret desire of Rousseau’s, freeing him from actions and their consequences.”20 Much as I honor Starobinski’s great book, this seems to me a seriously one-sided account. Rousseau’s ideal of oisiveté is not just passivity, and even the paranoid fantasy has a positive dimension, securing a privileged space within which he can free himself from a lifelong vulnerability to the gaze and judgments of other people. To be sure, in these last years Rousseau settles for a negative liberty that is very different from the willed choosing of happiness that he espoused in Emile. He now says (in the Reveries), “I have never believed that man’s freedom consists in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what

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he doesn’t want.”21 Without question this is how Rousseau often talked and wrote. But if we immerse ourselves in the details of his final years in Paris – and a good deal of correspondence survives, along with reminiscences by people who knew him, collected in R. A. Leigh’s awe-inspiring edition of the Correspondance22 – we encounter a way of life that is unexpectedly contented. Rousseau may have felt existentially alone, but he was certainly not socially alone. There are many anecdotes of agreeable conversations with visitors, playful flirtation with neighbors, and agreeable days spent strolling in the countryside with the intelligent and congenial Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Above all, there was Thérèse, Rousseau’s loyal companion for the last thirty-three years of his life, for whom he certainly felt a deeper and more sustaining affection than he chose to acknowledge in the Confessions. Indeed, it is in the Dialogues – in a passage not often quoted – that Rousseau testifies to the importance of affective connection with other people: I know that an absolute solitude is a gloomy state, and contrary to nature. The affectionate feelings nourish the soul, and the communication of thoughts revives the spirit. Our sweetest existence is relative and collective, and our true self [moi] is not altogether within ourselves.23

My claim is this: Rousseau’s paranoia served him as a valuable shield of defense, a sort of firewall against the host of imagined threats that he projected onto the world around him. No longer would he have to respond to the public that once adored him, but now accepted a false image of the author it referred to familiarly as “Jean-Jacques.” And no longer would he allow his repos to be threatened by uninvited face-toface contacts, whether with strangers presumptuously seeking a celebrity, or with rival writers. (Incidentally, while it was untrue that Hume was conspiring against Rousseau, that’s not so sure in the case of Diderot and Grimm. As became known more than a century later, they were helping Madame d’Epinay to fabricate damaging letters in her novel Madame de Montbrillant, which posterity would long accept as authentic.) As for the negative liberty of not doing what one doesn’t want: there is no denying that it entails renouncing a great deal, as Philip Larkin sourly admits in a poem with the depressing title “The Life with a Hole in It”: when people claim that he’s always done what he wanted, he replies “I’ve never done what I don’t.” But Larkin is a poet of disappointment and self-contempt, and Rousseau’s attitude is very different. In espousing negative liberty, he is reacting explicitly against the constraints of liberté politique, for it is precisely in seeking active engagement that people are


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most unfree. Immediately after advocating for negative liberty, he goes on to say: Active, busy, ambitious, detesting freedom in others, and not wanting it for themselves so long as they can sometimes satisfy their desires, or rather dom inate the desires of others, they put themselves out through their entire lives to do what they dislike, and they omit no servility in order to command.24

For Diderot and Hume (and Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith) it was natural and good to internalize other people’s expectations. For Rousseau, it was unnatural and bad, deforming the would-be oppressor just as much as the intended victim. He says at the beginning of the Social Contract, “He who believes himself the master of others still remains a greater slave than they.”25 In Emile he speaks even more forcefully about the loss of authenticity entailed by the mutual “sympathy” that Hume and Smith recommended: “As soon as you see through the eyes of others, you must will through their wills … You’re always saying ‘We want,’ and you always do what the others want.”26 In this context, oisiveté is not passive laziness at all, but an attempt to recover the state of being of natural man, who lived wholly in the present, and would have been bewildered by the workaholic competitiveness of the modern Western world. So far as work was concerned, Rousseau took pride in supporting himself by copying music, not just because it was an honorable trade, as his father’s (watchmaking) had been, but because he was free to do it, or not do it, as he wished. He says in the Dialogues – in one of the many passages that fail to evoke any hint of an abyss of despair: It is through idleness, nonchalance, and aversion to dependency and bother that Jean-Jacques copies music. He does his task as and when it pleases him; he doesn’t have to account for his day, his time, his labor, or his leisure to anyone … He is himself, and for himself, all day and every day.27

Rousseau’s avocation of botanizing in the nearby countryside served a similar purpose. It calmed his spirit to walk for miles in the woods and fields, and, as he states clearly in the Dialogues, this was an energetic activity altogether opposed to laziness in the usual sense. He can’t endure absolute idleness; his hands, feet, and fingers have to be active, and his body must be exercising while his head is at rest. Hence his passion for walking: he is then in motion without having to think.28

During these excursions, he could study and experience nature with no temptation to use that knowledge as a counter in the game of intellectual

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prestige. Bernardin, who shared his enthusiasm for direct contact with nature, makes clear that the pleasure Rousseau took was constant and deep. Out of many such passages I will quote one in particular, Bernardin’s recollection of Rousseau’s comments on the song of the nightingale: “Our musicians,” [Rousseau] would say, “have all imitated its high and low notes, its runs and capriccios, but what characterizes it – its prolonged piping, its sobs, the sighing sounds that go to the soul and pervade its song – that’s what no one has been able to capture.”29

Granting that this is one master stylist recollecting the conversation of another, it doesn’t sound at all like a person trapped in paralyzing delusion. We may go further. Rousseau remarks in the Reveries that in old age his imagination was beginning to weaken, but that was not necessarily a bad thing. From the time of his boyhood identification with the ancient Romans and the superheroes of romance, imagination had been an escape from reality, as he acknowledged in the Confessions. And when writing the Confessions themselves, as he later understood, he was often imagining what he believed he must have felt, rather than accurately reporting what really had happened years before. A number of passages in the Reveries do exalt imaginative escape in terms that fit Starobinski’s account: “My soul wanders and glides through the universe on the wings of imagination and in ecstasies that pass all other gratification” – not the peace that transcends understanding, but the jouissance of the imaginary. In empiricist doctrine, only particulars are real; in imaginative flight, Rousseau says here, particulars cease to matter: “All particular objects escape him; he sees and feels only le tout.”30 That was certainly the mood of the all-too-brief sojourn years before on the Île de Saint-Pierre, lying at ease in a little boat and letting it drift where it would, or being lulled into a trance by the lapping of the waves. But now, in these latter days, with imagination no longer so imperious, it is conceivable that the very opposite was taking place. Rousseau could wall off his anxieties – that was the positive function of the complot – and live one moment at a time in the world of concrete particulars. Once more I quote a neglected passage in the Dialogues. Rousseau observes that, whereas he used to be quite inattentive to the objects around him, he now experiences “une sensualité d’enfant” of which the sages know nothing. “The activity of some machine, a passing boat, a turning mill, a herdsman at work, people playing boules or a racket game, the river flowing by, a bird in flight, all attract his gaze.”31 And these are


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not scenes of an idealized “nature” devoid of humanity. On the contrary, the machines and the mill, the herdsman, and the players at boules, inhabit a human world which Rousseau can regard with equanimity, so long as he feels securely excluded from its obligations. Exclusion is what he wants, and needs. A further corollary: Rousseau had always yearned for the way nat ural man must have lived entirely in the present, untroubled by a past he could not remember, unworried by a future he could not foresee. In The Solitaries, the unfinished, sad sequel to Emile, Sophie betrays Emile with a lover and dies, and Emile becomes a slave in North Africa. Yet, in losing the world, Emile gains his soul, and he learns above all to appreciate the ineluctable presentness of existence, precisely because – like Rousseau himself – he has renounced the torment of hope: Delivered from the anxiety of hope, certain of gradually losing the anxiety of desire, and seeing that the past was nothing to me any more, I tried to put myself entirely in the condition of a man who is beginning to live. I said to myself that in reality we never do anything but begin, and that there is no other connection in our existence than a succession of present moments, the first of which is always the one that is just happening. We die, and we are born each instant of our lives.32

In an unforgettable moment in the Reveries, a strange accident permitted Rousseau to experience the freedom of atemporality in real life. He was making his way along a narrow street, on his way home from a long day’s excursion, when a nobleman’s carriage came hurtling toward him, flanked by a huge galloping Great Dane. The dog bowled Rousseau over, and he fell hard on the cobblestoned street, bleeding profusely and unconscious. The carriage never slowed down, but passersby hurried to help him, and after he revived he was so bewildered by the concussion that he had no idea what was going on, or even that he was hurt. When he got home, however, Thérèse cried out in horror at his mangled appearance, and it was some time before he recovered. Yet Rousseau’s account of this episode is remarkably, and thought-provokingly, positive: Night was beginning to fall. I perceived the sky, some stars, and green leaves. This first sensation was a delicious moment. I was conscious of myself only through this. I was being born into life in that instant, and it seemed to me that I filled up all the objects I perceived with my frail existence. Entirely absorbed in the present moment, I remembered nothing; I had no distinct notion of my individuality, nor the slightest idea of what had just happened to me; I didn’t know who I was or where I was; I felt no pain, or fear, or uneasiness. I watched my blood flow just as I would have watched a brook, without imagining that this

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blood belonged in any way to me. I felt throughout my whole being a ravishing calm, and every time I remember it I can find nothing comparable in all the activity of familiar pleasures.33

In this post-concussion state, Rousseau saw particulars, and only particulars: the leaves, the sky, the stars. He was existing fully and entirely in the moment, exactly like natural man, with no past and no future. He had no notion of his own individuality, this Jean-Jacques who had declared in the Confessions that he was made like no other, and whose mold nature broke after making him. And far from being alarming, the experience filled his being with “un calme ravissant.” Here, indeed, was the sentiment de l’existence, all the more meaningful since, in empiricist psychology, people were defined entirely by the coherence of their memories. Whatever you could remember was who you were; conversely, what you could no longer remember had ceased to be a part of you. But, according to Rousseau’s intuition, he was at last truly himself and truly free, no longer deformed by the expectations of other people, unable even to attach any significance to them. Especially interesting is the comment of Rousseau’s friend GuillaumeOlivier de Corancez, who visited him the next day and was horrified by the damage to his face. Corancez fully expected Rousseau to ascribe the disaster to the complot, since the nobleman who owned the Great Dane might well be imagined an enemy who had deliberately planned the attack. Quite the contrary: Rousseau said that it was the merest accident. The dog, indeed, had done its best to swerve out of the way, and it was Rousseau himself who panicked and jumped inadvertently into its path. So here, at last, was existential freedom! Lying bewildered in the street, in a state of deep dissociation, Rousseau was vouchsafed an almost mys tical experience of the sentiment de l’existence in its purest form. And this epiphany was the result not of the omnipotent complot, nor even of his personal destiny, but an irruption of pure chance – an aleatory occurrence that made a mockery of all determinisms, whether Augustinian or Enlightenment. This, I believe, is the case that can be made for psychological liberty in Rousseau’s last years, adumbrated in various ways in his writings, and confirmed by the record of his daily life. But, as I acknowledged at the outset, this could only be a deliberately limited form of liberty, achieving its “freedom” by renouncing much of what freedom normally means. I have wanted mainly to suggest that Rousseau’s paranoia, far from being a crippling delusion, was a successful defense mechanism that allowed him


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access to that Stoic inner emigration that has always been an option for threatened people in times of trouble. In a famous poem, “To Althea, from Prison,” the seventeenth-century Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace expressly contrasted spiritual freedom with external constraint: The gods that wanton in the air, Know no such liberty.

Even closer to Rousseau’s negative solution is a lovely poem, by the same writer, called “The Grasshopper.” It makes large claims for freedom in renunciation: Thus richer than untempted kings are we, That asking nothing, nothing need.

Yet Lovelace has to admit that the song of the pleasure-loving grasshopper is no longer to be heard in a wintry age: Poor verdant fool! and now green ice! thy joys Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass. No t e s 1 Emile, ou de l’ éducation, OC, vol. iv, p. 710. All translations are the author’s. 2 J. S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. by S. Collini (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 5; Lettres écrites de la montagne, OC, vol. iii, p. 841. 3 Emile, ou de l’ éducation, OC, vol. iv, p. 857. 4 M. Eigeldinger, Lumières du mythe (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1983), p. 23. 5 I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 139, 135–6. 6 P. Hoffman, “La Liberté de l’âme heureuse,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 2 (1986), pp. 162–3. 7 Emile, ou de l’ éducation, OC, vol. iv, p. 586. 8 J. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. by G. B. Hill, rev. by L. F. Powell (Oxford Clarendon, 1934), vol. iii, p. 291, April 15, 1778. 9 S. Fanti, “Une lecture de J. J. Rousseau en micropsychanalyse,” Bulletin d’ information de l’association des amis de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1 (1964), pp. 3–15. 10 Les Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 63. 11 Les Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 148. 12 J. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 79. 13 Les Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 253. 14 Les Confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 416.

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15 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 756. 16 Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, OC, vol. i, p. 995. 17 F. Barguillet, Rousseau, ou l’ illusion passionnée: les rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991), p. 76. 18 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 999. 19 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1000. 20 Starobinski, La transparence et l’obstacle, p. 283. 21 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1059. 22 J.-J. Rousseau, Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by R. A. Leigh, 52 vols. (Geneva: Institut et musée Voltaire, 1965–1971; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1971–1998). 23 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 813. 24 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1059. 25 Du contrat social, OC, vol. iii, p. 351. 26 Emile, ou de l’ éducation, OC, vol. iv, p. 309. 27 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 847. 28 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, p. 845. 29 J. H. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, La Vie et les ouvrages de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by M. Souriau (Paris: E. Cornély, 1907), p. 57. 30 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, pp. 1062–3. 31 Dialogues, OC, vol. i, pp. 816–17. 32 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 905. 33 Rêveries, OC, vol. i, p. 1005.

CHAPTER 15

Freedom and the project of idleness* Pierre Saint-Amand

Rousseau’s autobiographical works base a series of practices of freedom on an unexpected foundation: that of idleness. My examples will be drawn mainly from two representative works: Rousseau, Judge of JeanJacques: Dialogues and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. In contrast to Rousseau’s political writings, where freedom is defined in relation to work, as a condition of the citizen’s political emancipation, Rousseau’s autobiographical period performs a virtual about-face when he develops his grand project of idleness. This reorientation is neatly summed up in a statement from his Considerations on the Government of Poland: “Repose and freedom appear incompatible to me; it is necessary to choose.”1 But, as we shall see, “doing nothing” becomes the formula for the solitary experience of freedom. Rousseau seeks to remove himself from various forms of constraint or subjugation. He chooses disengagement and disinterest. It is as if the thinker of the Social Contract later came to invent a logic of subjective freedom that is unfettered by any bond or attachment, a new sovereignty of liberty. Laziness is the organizing principle of Rousseau’s entire moral persona. He seeks to withdraw from the universe of action. This is what impels him to give in to a series of pursuits that could be described as invisible: for example, that of music, which Rousseau tells us is suited to his “lazy mind.”2 He adjusts easily to his middling financial condition – neither luxury nor deprivation – and his intellectual work is measured by the same yardstick of moderation. He must avoid the fatigue of work, especially when it is linked with the obligation to produce books. Thought must be free, not ruled by necessity: If I sometimes like to think, it is freely and without constraint, letting my ideas flow at will without subjecting them to anything. But thinking of this or of that as an obligation, as a trade, making my productions correct, methodical is for me the work of a galley slave.3 245

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Rousseau thus withholds his output from the market, applying the label “book factory”4 to the writer who produces books for money, who is incapable of the detachment required by “the products of [the] soul.”5 The “book factory” also recalls the hyperactive scientist whom Rousseau describes in the realm of scientific activity: both suffer from “the itch to talk.”6 Laziness, as a withdrawal from the world of will, installs Rousseau in a constellation of marginal figures. He joins, for example, those whose stance of motivated indigence entails a philosophical acceptance of circumstances and a refusal of capitalist accumulation. Laziness becomes the laziness of desire, an apathy with regard to objects. Rousseau finds an interesting way to describe this attitude: Another prop for his laziness in any affair that was a little lengthy was the uncertainty time places on successes which seem the most assured in the future, a thousand unforeseen events being capable of aborting the best conceived plan at any moment.7

Laziness is a friend of circumstance; it falls in step with probabilities. Jean-Jacques chooses “to live from day to day.”8 In his autobiographical works, Rousseau proposes a series of activities that constitute a veritable scandal of unproductivity. Indeed, he admires the very spectacle of inaction. A case in point is the music score at which he hammers away endlessly, accumulating errors and deletions, deliberately stretching out the time devoted to it. Laziness naturalizes work; the true speed of nature is slowness: “He works slowly and ponderously, makes many mistakes, erases or starts over ceaselessly.”9 Rousseau’s laziness even accommodates labor and repetitive effort, for example, in making laces. In the Confessions, he recounts how this activity allowed him to stave off boredom “in the most perfect inaction.”10 Making laces is the very model of his project of inactivity. Rousseau is conscious of the marginalization to which his laces expose him. His vita otiosa, “tranquil and sweet life,”11 is also a feminine life: “I make laces: lacemaking has practically made a woman out of me.”12 Work as entertainment implies routine, mechanical repetition, a suspension of all effort. But the most radical forms of inactivity for Rousseau remain the reverie and the promenade. The reverie, the intellectual suspension of will, is the ultimate form assumed by the lazy mind. Reverie makes it possible to set aside the body in favor of the imagination. It is the entryway to the contemplative life. Reverie is the disgusted opposite of action, analogous to a sort of antimatter. In Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, we find this


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interesting consequence of reverie: the peculiar passivity of the subject, a singular dispossession of will. Rousseau writes that “one enjoys without acting.”13 As for the promenade, it incorporates the restless side of laziness, but still produces nothing. The promenade asks nothing of the will. It merely accompanies the subject, tracing his freely wandering paths: He will always repeat the same walk until some motive absolutely forces him to change. His feet carry him back by themselves to where they have already carried him: He likes to walk straight ahead always, because that can be done without his needing to think about it.14

Laziness is an involuntary reflex. One text epitomizes this double figure of inaction: the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. R e v e r i e s of l a z i n e s s: on f r e e i ng t h e s ou l Rousseau’s Reveries, written late in life (1772–1778), offers an interesting perspective on the deliberate intention to produce, above all, another body liberated from all constraints, existing apart from any relations of know ledge or power. In fact, through the course of this work, Rousseau meti culously disassembles the skeleton of the disciplinary body. The Reveries reproduce, though in an inverted form, the entire technology of control over the subject. Rousseau’s autobiographical project in this text must be understood directly as an enterprise of unfettered individualization, apolit ical in the sense of being disengaged from the various sites of power and from all forms of relation. This is what Rousseau calls his “desuetude” or “désœuvrement”:15 an attempt to disengage the body, to “air out” its materiality, to objectively nullify his person.16 Rousseau proposes the Reveries as an “examination.”17 Here the gesture of observation is strictly interiorized. It takes the form of a self-surveillance, but one that is disoriented, utterly without constraint, a meditation that dispenses with any results, any science of the self. Here self-examination becomes a volatile, unproductive operation. Right off the bat, Rousseau eschews order and method: I am incapable of such work, and it would even take me away from my goal, which is to make myself aware of the modifications of my soul and of their sequence. I will perform on myself, to a certain extent, the measurements natural scientists perform on the air in order to know its daily condition. I will apply the barometer to my soul, and these measurements, carefully executed and repeated over a long period of time, may furnish me results as certain as theirs. But I do not extend my enterprise that far. I will be content to keep a record of the measurements without seeking to reduce them to a system.18

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The Reveries can be seen as a follow-up, supplement, or appendix to the Confessions, as a lighter version of the confessional process. Rousseau seeks to avoid the posture of legal defense. The project of the Confessions was to engage in a “severe examination” (this is also true of the Dialogues, which may be seen as the simultaneously juridical and schizophrenic continuation of the Confessions).19 The return to the self in the Reveries aims at a spirit of lightness and airiness. The Reveries aim at undiluted pleasure, unencumbered by the moral weight of confession or the contortions of guilt. In this sense, Rousseau’s journal cancels out the Confessions. The examination of the subject here is concerned only with the ephemeral, the day-to-day. It is willfully oblivious to the past. The Reveries are written in the lightness of inconsequence. The physics lesson that begins the text, which suggests the barometer as the instrument akin to the journal, belongs to an ethereal brand of physics, a chemistry of the volatile, in short, the meteorology of the soul governing Rousseau’s enterprise. The Fifth Promenade is perhaps the best illustration of this new state for Jean-Jacques. This is the clearest expression of the unproductive subject. What many have seen as the gestation of the autonomous subject can be understood here as the complexly constructed asceticism of the individual freed from the constraints of time. Rousseau’s promenade abandons calculated time for the open schedule, the irregularity of whim, the individual’s idiosyncratic pursuits. The state he desires is one in which “time is nothing … and the present lasts forever without, however, making its duration noticed and without any trace of time’s passage.”20 Rousseau thus reports the happiness of his delightful retreat to the Île de Saint-Pierre: The precious far niente was the first and the principal enjoyment I wanted to savor in all its sweetness, and all I did during my sojourn was in effect only the delightful and necessary pursuit of a man who has devoted himself to idleness.21

This moment in the Reveries, which achieves a new conceptualization of time, can be juxtaposed to a key episode in the Dialogues, a fundamental part of the “reform” project, in which Rousseau relates how Jean-Jacques emancipates himself from his watch: The moment when he got rid of his watch, renouncing all thought of becoming rich in order to live from day to day, was one of the sweetest days of his life. Heaven be praised, he cried in a fit of joy, I won’t need to know what time it is any longer.22

Jean-Jacques frees himself from the discipline of the clock to enter into a personal, interiorized time, without rule or constraint – an idiosyncratic


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time of which he is the sole master, in which he can lose track of time. He bids good riddance to mechanically regulated time, divesting himself of any timetable. Detaching himself from the Genevan instrument of measurement par excellence – also a symbol of growing industrialization – is perhaps the most anti-Protestant and anti-Calvinist gesture in Rousseau’s body of work. Thus rest, the seat of pleasure, is opposed to work and to production. The cultivation of the self depends on pure idleness, on the forgetting of utilitarian action. To do nothing, literally, is to refuse the world’s materiality in favor of investment in the interior: “Movement which does not come from outside then occurs inside us.”23 Rousseau devotes himself to freeing the soul from the body’s incarcerating carapace. For Michel Foucault, as is well known, the classical soul is “the prison of the body,”24 the internalized seat of constraints imposed on the body. Jean-Jacques’s pursuit of liberation likewise takes on not only the subjugated organ but also its ideal existential effect. Idleness as the effacement of the exterior makes it possible to nourish the interior life of psychic activity alone. And even the latter is subject to a minimum of constraints: reasoning is abandoned; unmediated affect, or affective reminiscence, rules. In the end, even the activity of writing is doomed to inactivity. The notation of the reverie or promenade, through the avoidance of any stricture, obeys the order of the far niente, of absolute amusement, that is, of occupation as a waste of time. Thus the Reveries are from the outset doomed to the incompletion in which they end. Later, Rousseau proposes botany as the solitary walker’s ideal activity: “botany is a study for an idle and lazy solitary person.”25 He adds: “In this idle occupation there is a charm we feel only in the complete calm of the passions.”26 Just what is it about botany? If this activity enjoys Rousseau’s approval, it is because he conceives of it as fundamentally disinterested, barely requiring the investment of the body; it harmonizes with the “luxurious idleness” desired by the subject.27 If botany is still a form of work, it is, as Rousseau says, not “toilsome,” but “amusing” work.28 These finely drawn distinctions are appealing. The same promenade that is for Rousseau the botanist’s “sole labor”29 is also a form of recreation: the freely wandering gaze that observes without concern for profit or instruction. Jean-Jacques has eliminated other activities because they would impose constraints, yoking the organism extensively to activity. He thus bars himself from those forms of knowledge meant for practical applications. Botany has the advantage of existing apart from any utilitarian hierarchy of techniques. Rousseau

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reaches his decision through negative deduction, rejecting mineralogy for its deleterious demands: To make progress in the study of minerals, it is necessary to be a chemist and a physicist. It is necessary to perform tedious and costly experiments, to work in laboratories, to spend much money and time in the midst of charcoal, crucibles, furnaces, retorts, smoke, and suffocating fumes, always at the risk of life and often at the expense of health.30

The blacksmith embodies for Rousseau perhaps the most abject image of the laborer. He participates in artificial and excessive forms of industry, in the single-minded, circuitous, and nocturnal pursuit of natural riches. Even more opposed to the blacksmith than the botanist is the shepherd, who is in some sense the redeemed worker. Rousseau sees farm work as bathed in the glow of sunlight. His shepherd is absorbed by the contemplation of nature’s gifts. In fact, Rousseau even suggests, the shepherd does not work: he is the immediate recipient of the natural objects that are placed “within his reach.”31 Like the “robust plowmen” described in the Reveries,32 shepherds can abandon themselves to amorous diversions. The study of the animal kingdom later elicits reproaches: How am I to observe, dissect, study, become acquainted with the birds in the air, the fish in the water, or the quadrupeds swifter than the wind and stronger than man, which are no more disposed to come offer themselves to my research than I to run after them to make them submit to it by force?33

In contrast to such pursuits, botany makes no demands on the body and is not affected by any instrumentality. The botanist’s tools require no codification of the body: “a point and a magnifying glass are all the apparatus he needs.”34 These are nonbinding extensions of the organ that they supplement, in this case, the eye and the hand. In Rousseau’s vision, botany taps into a simple, virtually infantile, sensationism, which mobilizes only the primary organs, the primary instruments of the senses: the hand and the eyes.35 Here we see a detachment from all labor with its complement of interventionist tools. The herbarium that forms such a deliberate part of the botanist’s activity also denies its own status as writing. Rousseau is careful to avoid the academic approach to botany. This form of herbarium is not, to cite the Encyclopédie’s definition, a “book that studies plants,” a “method of botany”;36 instead, botany, for Rousseau, eschews rigorous classification. The objects encountered on a walk are immediately and without fuss selected for preservation: “with each new blade of grass I encounter, I say to myself with satisfaction: here is yet another plant.”37 The plants


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and flowers assembled by the collector are not signs. Like hieroglyphs, they partake of an affective, ornamental semiotics. They are the stuff of memory rather than of writing. As the traces of pure observation, they give themselves up to observation alone. Rousseau’s herbaria are “reminders” of familiar plants.38 They represent a stasis, a slow suspension in the course of the promenade, a poetic pause, a way to freeze what is fleeting. They bear witness to an encounter, a captured circumstance. There is no method in these herbaria: only the collection, the fortuitous gathering of odd moments. Botany traces a topography of the random, a nomadic trail of forgetfulness: To wander nonchalantly in the woods and in the country, here and there to take up mechanically, sometimes a flower, sometimes a branch; to graze on my fodder almost at random, to observe the same thing thousands of times, and always with the same interest because I always forgot them, was enough for me to pass eternity without being bored for a moment.39

In the Confessions, when Rousseau realizes the declining strength of his body, his “machine in decay,”40 the activities he considers are on the cusp of work and idleness. At Charmettes, as he imagines his approaching death, the activities of farm life become the occupation of his involuntary withdrawal. He describes the harvesting of grapes and other fruits. At the same time, however, as his frailty increases, he is progressively reduced to the role of idle spectator (“when I had given six blows with a spade, I was out of breath, sweat streamed down me, I could not do any more”).41 Later, Rousseau witnesses the prowess of Wintzenried, his new rival in Madame de Warens’s household. Seeing Wintzenried’s vigorous phys ique does Rousseau in. The new arrival at Charmettes is a hyperactive Hercules: His great pleasure was to pick up and carry, to saw or split wood, one always saw him with an axe or pick in his hand; one heard him running, thumping, shouting at the top of his lungs. I do not know how many men’s work he did.42

Madame de Warens’s woodsplitter sends Rousseau back to the highly ambiguous idleness of study and contemplation. Ax and pick contrast with Rousseau’s books of dreamy, unproductive musings, the distractions of learning. Another sentiment of dystopia in Rousseau’s work is the study. JeanJacques makes every effort to transform the confined space of the study into its opposite. Only when transplanted into nature can he write: “I never do anything except while taking a walk; the countryside is my study; the sight of a table, some paper, and books bores me.”43 In the

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Dialogues, Rousseau develops the opposition between botany and pharmacy. He describes a laboratory, with its stills, ovens, heads, and converters.44 In contrast, Rousseau’s favored work space is the “open field.”45 Scientific activity is reduced to simply showing “cartons filled with the stalks of plants … and seeds sorted into little, classified boxes.”46 With botany, there is no violation of the interiority or integrity of these objects of study, no chemical transformation such as pulverization or distillation. They are summoned only through visual contact, through the botanist’s naked eye. I now turn to one of the most surprising moments in the Reveries, in the Seventh Promenade, the solitary botanizing excursion that brings Rousseau to the doors of a stocking mill. True, this episode can be read as the unconscious reactivation of Rousseau’s paranoia, as he reencounters within his idyllic place of isolation and refuge the human contacts he has fled, his “persecutors.”47 Rousseau’s botanical reverie is interrupted by a certain repetitive “clanking” that was “repeated and increased,” the rhythmic noise of the factory, the cadence of work, of the machine itself.48 Here, extreme singularity is startled by the anonymous mechanical appar atus of “human industry”: I got up, burst through a thicket of brush on the side from which the noise was coming, and, in a little hollow twenty feet from the very place where I believed myself to have been the first to arrive, I saw a stocking mill.49

What an enormous irony this factory buzzing with workers poses for the lazy botanist! Rousseau is repelled by such agitation, which goes against the grain of the true philosophical attitude of exquisite repose. A distinction made by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition may shed light on this passage of the Reveries. Arendt emphasizes the new rhythm brought to bear by the industrial machine. The distinction that she makes is between work and labor. The machine is thus distinguished from the tools of homo faber: work, which used to involve individual, separate gestures, becomes labor, as the machine imposes a collective, “rhythmically ordered performance.”50 Arendt develops this notion: it is … the machine’s movement which enforces the movements of the body. The point is that nothing can be mechanized more easily and less artificially than the rhythm of the labor process.51

In the end, the alienation of homo faber from his tools and the substitution of the machine result in the disappearance of the rhythm of the human body.


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In the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau presents for our contemplation an ascetic construction of the self that escapes from the model of constraint. What must be heard in this project of retreat, as he envisions it in his final days, are his tedious cries for liberty. If this text is intended as a protest against the Enlightenment and its philosophes, Rousseau’s critique must be read as a languid idolization of freedom: “I could not bear subjection; I was perfectly free and better than free, for bound only by my affections. I did only what I wanted to do.”52 Shunning any and every obligation, the subject renounces all activity; he avoids doing at all cost: “I know that the only good which might henceforth be within my power is to abstain from acting.”53 Here Rousseau opposes himself to others who are compulsively “busy,” always “restless.”54 Between inaction and will, he achieves a paradoxical, critical reconciliation, the foundation of a new conduct, an ontological attitude, an ethics of freedom: “I no longer have any other rule of conduct than in everything to follow my own propensity without restraint.”55 Once again, Jean-Jacques becomes the “free agent” par excellence of the Second Discourse, the performer of “spiritual acts,” those gestures that define his humanity and remove him from the mechanical universe.56 More precisely, the “scandal” of Rousseau’s version of freedom (indeed, this is how he perceives the radical nature of his approach) must be understood according to a doubly negated restriction adopted by the subject “in never doing what he does not want to do.”57 Deleuze later sees this formulation of Rousseauist freedom as fitting squarely within the “logic of negative preference.”58 The grammar of Rousseau’s phrase indeed emphasizes the singular situation of the solitary subject; it imposes his reactive but absolute selectivity with respect to all forms of action. Rousseau makes laziness the very motor of lack of will, of will-lessness. This inertia is governed, above all, by the relation to the self, as he explains in the Dialogues: Rebellious to any other will, he doesn’t even know how to obey his own, or rather he finds it so tiring even to will that he prefers in the course of living to follow a purely mechanical impression that carries him along without his having to direct it.59

Moreover, “laziness of will” becomes Rousseau’s explanatory term for all other negations of activity. It must be aligned with the “laziness about thinking” and the “reluctance to talk.”60 Rousseau refines the contradiction of his situation, while trying to avoid the perception of a glorified, ostentatious laziness (as in the Latin

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otium). In this way, he makes an important distinction which could be summed up in the formula “do more; do nothing,” as in his description of the utopian island of Papimania in the Confessions. This is a veritable whirlwind of idleness, paradoxically built upon perpetual motion: The idleness I love is not that of a do-nothing who stays there with his arms crossed in total inactivity and thinks no more than he acts. It is both that of a child who is ceaselessly in motion while doing nothing and, at the same time, that of a dotard who strays when his arms are at rest. I love to occupy myself by doing trifles, beginning a hundred things and finishing none of them, going and coming as the fancy comes into my head, changing plans at each instant, following a fly in all its flying about, wanting to uproot a rock to see what is under it, undertaking a labor of ten years with ardor, and abandoning it without regret after ten minutes, in sum, musing all day long without order and without sequence, and following only the caprice of the moment in everything.61

However, it is clear that the Rousseauist vita otiosa accedes to transfiguration only at the price of renouncing history, even life itself, in the impatient quest for disappearance. The desire for an infinite suspension of time becomes time arrested or frozen. The creation of the subject, his epiphany, coincides with death, in an absolute retreat. In the end, the creature’s laziness coincides with the subject’s final blackout. If we return to the well-known historical “inversion” of the spheres of vita contemplativa and vita activa by which Hannah Arendt characterizes modernity, we may find in the purity of Rousseau’s quest for unproductiveness a form of a new equilibrium. His elucidation of a “work” of laziness, through his detachment from the physically constraining universe of labor, converges upon that peculiar asceticism of the subject, the serene and radical quiet ude of freedom. No t e s * Translated from the French by Jennifer Curtiss Gage. 1 “Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Planned Reformation,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly, 12 vols. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), vol. xi, p. 170. 2 Rousseau, “Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 122. 3 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 139. 4 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 139. 5 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 139. 6 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 139. 7 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 152.


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8 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 143. 9 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 145. 10 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 503. 11 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 503. 12 Letter of 4 September 1762 to Mme de Verdelin, OC, vol. i, p. 1572. 13 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 143. This involuntary pleasure is opposed to the objectless pleasure represented by the “dangerous supplement” of the Confessions. Sexual masturbation is a perversion of nature, and, at its origin, it seeks to recapture nature artificially; it does not take into account the slowness that constitutes the subject. Onanistic pleasure is impatient. Derrida sees it as avoiding the “duration of being.” J. Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p. 217. 14 Rousseau, “Dialogues” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 144. 15 Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), p. 41. The French word “désœuvrement” is not easy to translate and can also be rendered as “worklessness.” “The Reveries of the Solitary Walker,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 7. 16 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 8. 17 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 7. 18 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, pp. 7–8. 19 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 6. 20 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 46. 21 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 42. 22 Rousseau, “Dialogues” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p, 143. 23 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 47. 24 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 30. 25 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 64. 26 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 64. 27 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 47. 28 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 43. 29 Rousseau, “Fragments on Botany,” trans. by A. Cook in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 251. 30 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 63. 31 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 63. 32 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 62. 33 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 63. 34 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 64. 35 See Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 370. 36 “Herbier,” Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Neuchâtel, 1765), vol. viii, p. 149. 37 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 58. 38 Rousseau, “Letter VIII to Mme Delessert,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 160. 39 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 537.

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40 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 207. 41 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, pp. 195–6. 42 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, pp. 219–20. 43 Rousseau, “My Portrait,” in Collected Writings, vol. vii, p. 43, translation modified. 44 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 135. 45 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 833. 46 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 134. 47 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 65. 48 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 66. 49 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 66. 50 H. Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 145. 51 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 146. 52 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 90. 53 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 50. 54 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 50. 55 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 57. 56 Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 26. 57 Rousseau, “Reveries,” in Collected Writings, vol. viii, p. 56, emphasis added. 58 G. Deleuze, Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993), p. 93. 59 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 144. 60 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, pp. 115, 110. 61 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 537.

C h a p t e r 16

On the uses of negative freedom Marie-Hélène Huet

I do not think that one can seek the source of moral evil anywhere but in a free, perfected, thus corrupted man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to Voltaire 1

The publication, in 1762, of the Social Contract and Emile precipitated a series of official judgments against Jean-Jacques Rousseau.2 The works were banned or burned throughout Europe, from Catholic Rome to liberal Amsterdam. The Paris Parliament that condemned Emile also ordered its author to be arrested and jailed in the Paris Conciergerie. Refutations of Rousseau’s ideas began to appear everywhere. Private letters meant for public consumption, and works discussing his ideas point by point circulated freely. The officious Madame Du Deffand wrote: I have no sympathy for Jean-Jacques. He would return everything to chaos; I have never seen anything more contrary to common sense than his Emile, nothing more contrary to morals than his Héloïse, and nothing more boring and obscure than his Social Contract.3

In the Confessions, Rousseau narrated in detail the flight that followed the official censure of his works and the calls for his arrest. The rest of the story is well known, and offered Rousseau seemingly infinite opportunities to describe both the vast plot he imagined against him and the animosity he truly encountered during his years of wandering: “Here begins the work of darkness in which I have found myself enshrouded for the past eight years,” he writes at the beginning of Book xii of the Confessions.4 The most significant “work of darkness,” however, is not the plot against Rousseau, but the work he wrote as a sequel to Emile, entitled Emile et Sophie, ou les solitaires. In this deliberate destruction of the philo sophical monument he had built with such care, Rousseau outlines a radically new interpretation of his views on the nature and the practice of freedom. 257

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M a r i e -H é l è n e H u e t L e s s ol i ta i r e s

At the end of Emile, the hero has married the young woman who was meant for him. His proud tutor looks upon their family with pride and emotion: [Emile and Sophie’s] worthy parents see their own youth renewed in that of their children; they begin to live, as it were, afresh in them again … they perceive, for the first time, the fresh value of life … if there is happiness on earth, it is in the haven where we live that it is to be found.5

Near the end of the book, Emile prepares himself for the roles of both father and tutor to his future child. Emile’s own tutor, his mission officially concluded, will remain a part of the small society to which he has contributed so much. If happiness can be a measure of achievement, then Emile’s education has been a success. But in Emile et Sophie, ou les solitaires, death, betrayal, and the most degrading of social practices – slavery – all combine to wreck Emile’s life and hopes. Les Solitaires, which Rousseau never completed, comprises two long letters. In the first one, Emile tells his tutor of the disasters that befell him and destroyed his marriage. I was free, I was happy. Oh my master! You had given me a heart made for happiness, and you had given me Sophie … Alas! … All has disappeared as a dream; young still, I have lost everything, wife, children, friends, absolutely everything, intercourse with my fellow men even … I am dead to everything I cherished.6

Emile briefly recalls his past happiness: Already father of two children, I divided my time among an adored wife and the dear fruits of her tenderness; you helped me prepare for my son an education similar to mine, and my daughter growing under her mother’s eye, would have learned to resemble her.7

The secret of contentment is sketched genealogically: the son will be another Emile, the daughter another Sophie. But Sophie’s parents and the daughter of Sophie and Emile all die in the space of a few years, leaving Sophie disconsolate and Emile unable to bear the spectacle of her grief. Sophie later betrays Emile and finds herself pregnant with another man’s child. “Society women’s adulteries are only gallantries,” writes Emile, “but an adulterous Sophie is the most odious of all monsters.”8 Sophie has lost her innocence, and Emile has lost his own sense of self: “All was changed for me. I was not the same as the day before ... it was my own death I was crying over.”9

On the uses of negative freedom

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Even as he praises the values taught by his tutor – “I never felt more deeply than in this cruel circumstance the strength of education”10 – Emile fully measures the vanity of its founding principle: “I could not hide from myself the fact that I was reasoning in order to mislead myself, and not to enlighten myself.”11 The failure of reason precipitates the destruction of arguably the most perfect fiction ever imagined by a philosopher. As Emile meditates on Sophie’s betrayal, thoughts of infanticide invade the text: What! Nature herself authorizes this crime; and my wife, sharing her love between her two sons, will be forced to share her affection between their two fathers! This idea, more horrible than any that ever crossed my mind lit a blazing new rage in me; all the furies tore my heart again at the thought of this abhorrent sharing. Yes, I would have preferred to see my son dead than to see Sophie have a son from another man.12

Remorse notwithstanding, there appears to be no future for Sophie’s or Emile’s progeny: “If my family had followed my recommendations, Sophie would have raised this child, and this child would perhaps be still alive; but perhaps, also, Sophie was already dead for me.”13 It is not clear at this point whether the announced death is that of Sophie’s illegitimate child, or that of the son fathered by Emile. The sons will remain forever unnamed and their genealogy thoroughly confused. Emile abandons his wife and flees the country, to lead for an unspecified period of time the life of a wanderer. His story takes an unlikely turn when the ship he has boarded for a crossing to Naples is captured by pirates, and Emile is sold as a slave. At this point of the story, Rousseau reiterates principles he outlined in the Social Contract: I changed masters several times: they called that “selling” me; as if a man could ever be sold. They sold the work of my hands; but my will, my understanding, my being, everything that made me and not another [tout ce par quoi j’ étais moi, et non pas un autre] could certainly not be sold.14

The greater part of the second letter describes Emile’s stoic resolve in the face of his enslavement. Thomas Kavanagh, one of the few scholars to have seized on the import ance of Les Solitaires, sees in Rousseau’s sequel an indispensable complement to his treatise on education: “It is difficult to accept Emile’s ending as authentic closure,” he writes, noting that Les Solitaires is “a text far more essential to the central concerns of Emile than the rocambolesque Afrikareise to which it is often reduced.”15 For Pierre Burgelin, as well,

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M a r i e -H é l è n e H u e t

Les Solitaires continues Emile’s education, putting the value of the tutor’s principles to the most rigorous tests: Emile and Sophie’s education remains in a sense incomplete. What is the merit in their happiness? Everything has been prepared for them, given to them even. They have never met those true obstacles life raises on the best paths in order to test us … It is necessary to transform their success and teach them to overcome failure by themselves.16

Burgelin points out that Emile’s strength while a slave recalls the Stoic models of Antiquity. Emile’s wisdom and sense of justice do not fail him, and he gains a superior form of freedom while in the hands of the vilest masters. For Burgelin, Rousseau’s intentions are unambiguous: Fate may well make [of Emile] a slave in Algiers; it will also give him the opportunity to find his place in a society that will be first that of the slaves, where he will try to raise the general will … Just when Rousseau is about to lose everything, when persecution pushes him into exile, he gives himself this lesson. His system is complete.17

From this point of view, the unfinished sequel would constitute the crowning achievement of Emile’s education, through which he has learned to transcend loneliness and despondency, rising from the depth of servitude to a position of influence.18 Although Rousseau never finished Les Solitaires, he never forgot it. “I have for this work a weakness I do not fight,” he wrote in 1768. Pierre Prévost recounted Rousseau’s reaction when, years after its original composition, he read the text aloud to Prévost, his guest: “The reading of this fragment … acquired a new price through the passionate accent of his voice, and through the form of contagious emotion to which he abandoned himself.”19 Rousseau, it appears, clung to the enslaved Emile, to the ruins of his pupil’s happiness and the doubtful outcome of his stoic resolutions. The writing of Les Solitaires spread over a period of sixteen years “as a lasting agony,” notes Frédéric Eigeldinger.20 Emile remained a slave whom Rousseau could neither free nor kill. Some of Rousseau’s friends and publishers, most famous among them Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, did propose various happy endings for Les Solitaires. In one version, Emile and Sophie are reconciled; in another Emile marries a Spanish woman stranded on an island, where Sophie finds them and they live briefly in a ménage à trois. These rather outlandish sequels serve only to underline the deeply disturbing character of Les Solitaires. Whether or not Rousseau himself participated in concocting these unlikely sequels, he never wrote them. We must, therefore, take the


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incompleteness of the text seriously. I would argue that the unfinished state of Les Solitaires is integral to the message it meant to convey, and that its incompleteness is itself a philosophical necessity. N e g at i v e f r e e d om As he begins his life of wandering, Emile writes to his tutor: If at times I asked myself: what I am doing? Where am I going? What is my goal? I replied to myself: what have I done in being born but to start on a voyage that must end only with my death? I accomplish my task; I remain in my place; I use this short life with innocence and simplicity; I always do great good by the evil I do not do among my fellow men.21

These lines echo a passage Rousseau had marked years before, though not commented upon, in his notes on Claude-Adrien Helvétius’s De l’esprit: “The great man considers as a blessing all the evil other men do not do to him.”22 The specific use of the negative form – “le mal que je ne fais pas” – relates directly to one of the pervasive themes Rousseau later develops in the unfinished Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, where he describes his life as a reclaimed solitude, defined by a specific use of freedom, that of not doing: “I have often abstained from a good action I had the desire and the power to do, frightened of the subjection I would submit myself to afterward if I yielded to it without reflection.”23 What, precisely, is the nature of a “freedom born of abstention”? In Les Solitaires, Emile’s enslavement sets the stage for a philosophical demonstration of the ambiguous nature of freedom: The time of my servitude was also that of my reign, and I never had more authority over myself than when I was in barbarians’ chains.24

At first glance, these lines seem to echo the fourth chapter of the Social Contract, where Rousseau states that “a man who becomes another man’s slave does not give himself.”25 But what is the nature of Emile’s reign, or that of his freedom? If freedom consisted in doing what one wants, no man would be free. All men are weak, dependent on the course of events, and on harsh necessity; he who knows best to want what necessity orders him to do is the most free, since he is never forced to do what he does not want to.26

To accept – even desire – one’s obligations thus yields the only kind of freedom that is possible for man. For once man has entered society, freedom eludes him.

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With a startling economy of words, the ominous formulation of the Second Discourse – “In becoming sociable and a slave [man] becomes weak”27 – equates the subjection of man’s independent mind with the corrupting effect of social greed. Although man is capable of choosing or rejecting an action through an act of will, the increasing pressures placed upon him by society reduce him to the worst kind of servitude. In Les Solitaires, however, the “necessity” that dictates to man lies not only in the limitations imposed by social servitude, but in all the constraints that prevent man from asserting his positive freedom. The highly restricted choice open to Emile – or, for that matter, to Jean-Jacques – consists in yielding to adversity, even to the point of desiring it. On one occasion, Emile’s tutor defines “freedom” as a narrow choice between obligation and necessity, stating that the truly free man wants only that which it is within his power to obtain or to do: “to will what is, and to order one’s heart according to one’s destiny.”28 During his time as a slave, Emile remembers his tutor’s teachings: I am freer than I used to be. Emile a slave! I said again. Eh! In what sense? What have I lost of my primitive freedom? Was I not born a slave of necessity? What new yoke can men impose upon me?29

Emile’s initial reappraisal of his restricted freedom faithfully echoes the views of the Stoics on liberty. Rousseau had read Epictetus: Of things that exist, some are in our power, some are not in our power … But if you hold that only to be your own which is so, and the alien for which it is, alien, then none shall ever compel you, none shall hinder you, you will blame no one, none shall harm you, you will not do the least thing unwillingly.30

As he dutifully recites lessons from a happier time, Emile no longer addresses his tutor as “Maître”, but as “Père”: the semantic shift that prefaces Emile’s transformed circumstances is also a matter of genealogical necessity, a counterpoint to the confusion that could not be dispelled when it came to Emile’s sons. There is no longer a master and tutor; Rousseau has relinquished the post, and the word has been corrupted by the practice of slavery. “Father” will do better, a father of choice, and a just compensation for the sons one chooses to have or not to have. But it soon becomes apparent that the lessons of the father/tutor do not yield the superior freedom to which Emile once aspired: “In my current state, what can I will? To avoid annihilation, I need to be moved by another’s will for lack of my own.”31 This form of abdication goes beyond the Stoics’ essential imperative, that if one cannot command events to conform to one’s will, then one must conform one’s will to unavoidable


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events. And Emile’s lack of will is a far cry, too, from the revolt of the slaves anticipated at the end of the Second Discourse, where Rousseau wrote: The despot is master only as long as he is the strongest, and as soon as he can be driven out, he cannot protest against violence. The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his subjects.32

As Jean Starobinski has noted, Friedrich Engels thought that these last pages represented for Rousseau the ultimate overcoming of oppression, a revolution through which men “accomplish the negation of a negation.”33 But by the time Rousseau writes Les Solitaires, nothing but Emile’s abdication of his will to another’s can save him from complete annihilation (“l’anéantissement”), which, for Rousseau, is both bliss and a curse. Alienation – both accepted and desired – thus serves as the last, and most compromised, exercise of freedom. These two modes of freedom, accepted alienation and abstention, appear again in the Rêveries, spelling out, in the most unambiguous terms, Rousseau’s paradoxical redefinition of liberty. In the First Promenade, he writes: “I am henceforth nothing among men, and that is all I can be, no longer having any real relations or true society with them … to abstain has become my sole duty.”34 In the Sixth Promenade, he repeats, Some kinds of adversity elevate and strengthen the soul, but some strike it down and kill it; such is the one to which I am prey … my adversity … could have made me frenetic; but it has only made me null.35

Echoing Helvétius once again, he adds: “Unable to do good either for myself or for others, I abstain from acting.”36 At that point, it seems, Rousseau abdicates all forms of involvement in the political or the social body. His claim to sovereignty, like that of Emile’s “reign” while a slave, entails an absolute withdrawal from the sphere of action. T h e di s s ol u t ion of t h e s e l f Rousseau’s anéantissement may have found its most explicit formulation in the well-known passage in the Rêveries where he describes the “delicious moment” of regaining consciousness after having been knocked down by a dog, and waking up having forgotten everything, including his own name. “Here Rousseau, in an anticipatory fort/da game of textual command, narrates the power to forget from his place as subject,” writes

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Avital Ronell, “With suspicious precision,” she adds, “Rousseau remembers the experience of forgetfulness.”37 He writes: I was born into life at that instant, and it seemed to me that I filled all the objects I perceived with my frail existence. Entirely absorbed by the present moment, I remembered nothing; I had no distinct notion of my person nor the least idea of what had just happened to me; I knew neither who I was nor where I was.

In this ecstatic loss of individual consciousness, Rousseau’s feeling of existence expands beyond the boundaries usually set by purpose or memory. I felt a rapturous calm in my whole being; and each time I remember it, I find nothing comparable to it in all the activity of known pleasures.38

Freud has provided us with an analytical description of such moments. At the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents, he mentions a letter he received from the French writer Romain Rolland, who there describes “the true source of religious sentiments” as “a peculiar feeling … a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were ‘oceanic’.” At first Freud rejects the concept: “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself,” he writes. But he goes on to suggest that this “oceanic” experience may well be connected to an earlier stage of the ego, “a residue of a much more inclusive – indeed, all-embracing – feeling which corresponds to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.”39 This “feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with external world as a whole,” and Rousseau’s account of how he filled all available space with his “frail existence,” opens the possibility of anéantissement as epiphany, an unmediated relief from the burden of individual consciousness and the compromises inherent to all actions. But the experience of indifferentiation, of an intimate bond between the ego and the world, which, for Freud, hearkens back to early childhood, is itself contemporaneous with, and compromised by, the infant’s helplessness and longing for the father – the true source of the religious sentiment to which Rolland attributed his “oceanic feeling.” Freud is quick to note that the derivation of religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate.40

Leaving aside Emile’s longing for his master/father and the fragility of the child’s intimate bond with the world, let us simply recall Leo Bersani’s observation that a further reversal takes place later in Freud’s text, when the “blind fury of destructiveness” that characterizes the death drive is


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described in terms strangely reminiscent of the oceanic feeling “traceable to the limitless narcissism of infancy.”41 Behind the various forms of annihilation that emerge in Rousseau’s later works – whether Emile’s subjection to another’s will or Rousseau’s temporary loss of individual consciousness – there remains a form of destructiveness, a manifestation of the death drive that compromises not only Jean-Jacques’s consciousness of the self, but the image he wishes to leave, and which has become more valuable than his own existence. If there is no stated violence in Emile’s deliberate acceptance of, and subjection to, a master’s will, there is a destructive fury at work in Rousseau’s systematic undoing of the happy life he had so carefully contrived for his ideal pupil. The anéantissement is not merely that of Emile’s will but also that of Rousseau’s Emile, the treatise that in his Confessions he calls his best work. L e g ac i e s Rousseau’s readers are familiar with his fear of being confused with the mediocre poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, but the anxiety that dominated his later years was caused by his conviction that his writings had been disfigured, plagiarized, censored – “buried,” as it were – by imitators, enemies, and political authorities. “I wrote my first Confessions and my Dialogues in constant anxiety about ways to keep them from the rapacious hands of my persecutors in order to transmit them, if it were possible, to other generations,” he explains in the First Promenade of the Rêveries.42 A similar anxiety had appeared at the time Emile was published: A few days before or after the publication of my book; for I do not recall the exact time very well, another work appeared on the same subject taken word for word from my first volume, aside from some platitudes that were mixed into this extract. This book carried the name of a Genevan called Balexert, and it was said in the title that he had won the prize of the Academy of Harlem. I understood easily that this Academy and this prize were of an entirely new creation in order to disguise the plagiarism from the public’s eyes.43

Rousseau later deplored the publication of the Dialogues de Phocion: “I saw only a compilation of my writings made without restraint and without shame.”44 Rousseau is thus dealing with a problem of legacy or, rather, with the laws affecting legacy, such as naming the father, naming the child, true and false resemblances, adultery, and usurpation. No doubt the sin of plagiarism meant little for a man who, after all, had hoped for a time to inspire followers, whose stated ambition had

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been to exert a beneficial influence on his fellow men, to act freely as a philosophical guide to his contemporaries. But a greater fear haunted Rousseau: that his own books, the children of his intellect, would be unfaithfully read or illegally printed. The Confessions describe at length his publisher Rey’s fraudulent impressions. The Third Dialogue mentions “the extraordinary measures taken to alter and disfigure his writings,”45 and finally the loss of his papers, which “all passed into the hands of his persecutors, who didn’t fail to destroy those that might not suit them and modify the others at their whim.”46 Rousseau’s legitimate intellectual progeny is thus threatened by suppression, loss, and adulteration, while illegitimate works written by other hands claim his paternity. The Second Promenade reiterates what becomes the main preoccupation of the author’s later years. After his accident, and after having heard the rumor that he was dead, Rousseau discovered: they had at the same time started a subscription for printing the manuscripts they would find in my home. By that I understood that they were keeping a collection of fabricated writings available just for the purpose of attributing them to me after my death.47

The “ghost of paternity”48 that pursues Rousseau and destroyed Emile slowly emerges as the major burden of the author’s later years. The burden of this unwanted, illegitimate progeny is also described in the Third Promenade, when Rousseau, evoking the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” adds that his work has been “vilely prostituted and profaned among the present generation.”49 Though not excluding the possibility that one day the “Profession” might incite a revolution among men, he does not anticipate that this will happen in the foreseeable future. It has become clear: Rousseau will have no progeny. Torn by the theft of his papers, the fraud of his publisher, the works falsely attributed to him, and the adulteration of his own works, he suffers the angst of a betrayed Emile. An adulterous Sophie, who has become in Emile’s eyes hardly better than a prostitute, has led Emile to abandon his own son, linking the authentic and the inauthentic inextricably in an ultimate gesture of renunciation that becomes also the ultimate gesture of freedom. The Dialogues meant to reestablish Rousseau’s legitimate paternity themselves “engendered” two texts he thought could alone protect the work of his tortured mind.50 In History of the Preceding Writing, he describes his failed attempt to leave his manuscript wrapped like a newborn child on the main altar of Notre Dame, hoping that this enfant trouvé might somehow reach the Prince’s eyes and vindicate his author. Having found


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the Choir closed, Rousseau sent a copy of the Dialogues to Etienne Bonnot de Condillac and gave another one to Brooke Boothby, a young Englishman who had visited him. Still doubting that he would be read without being betrayed, Rousseau imagined distributing a small text, “To All Frenchmen Who Still Love Justice and Truth,” in which he would denounce in advance the publication of a distorted version of his life. Amidst this feverish activity, which contrasts with the more leisurely pace of the Rêveries, Rousseau finally names the father’s law or, rather, the law of the father’s will: to renounce and to disown. The negative freedom which alone mitigates Emile’s toils and the later years of Jean-Jacques is that of disowning, of withholding the father’s name. S ac r i f ic e s Yet Rousseau’s final estrangement from society is no just renunciation, and his willful abstention produces an elusive sense of freedom that is also evoked by Kant, not in the Critique of Practical Reason, but in his analytic of the sublime: The satisfaction in the sublime in nature is only negative …, namely a feeling of the deprivation of the freedom of the imagination by itself, insofar as it is purposively determined in accordance with a law other than that of its empirical use.51

The sacrifice of the power of imagination is associated in Kant’s analysis with the negative presentation of morality and liberty, “for the inscrut ability of the idea of freedom,” Kant notes, “entirely precludes any positive determination.”52 This is where, in his own version of freedom, Rousseau makes a far more ambitious claim than Emile’s. His will to inaction, his choice to be null serves paradoxically as the ultimate affirmation of the self. Left solely to his inclination, Rousseau would take action and fully participate in the world that rejected him. His final refusal to act reflects a far greater measure of strength. “I abstain from acting,” he observes, “for all my weakness is for action, all my strength is negative.”53 The key word in this case is “strength,” and the best commentary on Rousseau’s strength at this point may well be Gilles Deleuze’s description of Friedrich Nietzsche’s will to power: Will to power does not mean that the will wants power … Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will … What the will to power wills is a particular relation of forces, a particular quality of forces. And also a particular quality of power: affirming or denying.54

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Rousseau’s pre-Nietzschean will “does not aspire, it does not desire, above all, it does not desire power.”55 Rousseau’s force resides in his will not to act, and is best expressed in his withdrawal from the sphere of influence to which he had once aspired, his power to deny, even to himself, an inclin ation to act. In his Critique, Kant suggestively commented that “the separation from all society is also regarded as something sublime if it rests on ideas that look beyond all sensible interest.”56 The solitude first posited in the Rêveries is the result of proscription: I am now alone on earth, no longer having any brother, neighbor, friend, or society other than myself. The most sociable and the most loving of humans has been proscribed from society by a unanimous agreement.57

But Rousseau’s loneliness is slowly transformed into a meditation that opens the way to an interior vision of the self that “silences the imagin ation” (a recurrent theme of the Second Promenade) and claims separ ation from society as the fragile condition for an elusive happiness. The unfinished Rêveries complete the unfinished Solitaires in at least one respect: they elucidate the nature of Emile’s mastery, not as empirical freedom, not as triumph over adversity, not as stoicism, but rather as the new discovery that the negative freedom of abstention alone will bring, through the paradoxical experience of alienation, the restful anéantissement that is an object both of fear and of desire. T h e r i ng of G yg e s At the beginning of the Sixth Promenade, Rousseau describes the lame child whose repeated entreaties first charmed, then annoyed the philosopher, particularly because the child called him by his name: He never failed to call me Monsieur Rousseau many times, to show that he knew me well. But, to the contrary, that only taught me that he knew me no more than those who had instructed him.58

The name of Rousseau has been so disfigured among men that the phil osopher ceases to be recognized by it, and the episode opens up the possibility that renouncing one’s own works might entail renouncing one’s own name as well. In the meditation that follows, Rousseau writes: If I had been invisible and all-powerful like God, I would have been beneficent and good like Him … If I had been the possessor of the ring of Gyges, it would have freed me from dependence on men and made them dependent on me.59


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The legend of the ring served to open a discussion of liberty in Book ii of Plato’s Republic: The liberty which we are supposing may be most completely given to [the just and the unjust] in the form of such a power as is said to have been possessed by Gyges, the ancestor of Croesus the Lydian. According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he, stooping and looking in, saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended.60

The ring turns out to confer the power to disappear and to reappear at will: Whereupon [Gyges] contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom.61

The story, as told by Glaucon to Socrates, serves to demonstrate that no man, just or unjust, can resist the temptations put in his way by such absolute power: Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice … Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity.62

Similarly, Rousseau argues that the ability to penetrate everywhere invisibly might have made me seek temptations I would have poorly resisted … Anyone whose power puts him above other men ought to be above human weaknesses; otherwise, this excess of strength will in effect serve only to put him below others and below what he himself would have been had he remained their equal.

Rousseau concludes: “All things considered, I believe I will do better to throw away my magic ring.”63 Freed from the necessity that binds both the just and the unjust when they are burdened by excessive powers, Rousseau determines to remain among men, disfigured though he is by his enemies, yet not invisible: If men persist in seeing me as the opposite of what I am, and if the sight of me provokes their injustice, I must flee them to deprive them of this sight, not

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disappear from their midst … They will never see in my place anyone but the Jean-Jacques they have made for themselves and made to their heart’s desire to hate at their ease. I would therefore be wrong to be affected by the way they see me. I ought to take no real interest in it, for it is not I whom they see in this way.64

Once again, in his analytic of the sublime, Kant gives the best commentary on Rousseau’s narrowly defined isolation and self-sufficiency in the face of adversity: To be self-sufficient, hence not to need society, yet without being unsociable, i.e., fleeing it, is something that comes close to the sublime, just like any superiority over needs. In contrast, to flee from human beings out of misanthropy, because one is hostile to them, or out of anthropophobia [fear of people], because one fears them as enemies, is in part hateful and in part contemptible.

“Nevertheless,” Kant is quick to add, there is a kind of misanthropy (very improperly so called), the predisposition to which is often found in the mind of many well-thinking people as they get older, which is certainly philanthropic enough as far as their benevolence is concerned … Falsehood, ingratitude, injustice, the childishness in ends that we ourselves hold to be important and great, in the pursuit of which people do every conceivable evil to each other, so contradicts the idea of what they could be if they wanted to, and are so opposed to the lively wish to take a better view of them that, in order not to hate them, since one cannot love them, doing without all social joys seems to be only a small sacrifice. This sadness … is sublime.65

“I have become solitary or, as they say, unsociable and misanthropic,” explains Rousseau, “because to me the most desolate solitude seems preferable to the society of wicked men which is nourished only by betrayals and hatred.”66 At the end of his Rêveries, Rousseau has gone beyond the both the obligations that tied him to other men, the desire to defend his true image, and also beyond the brief ecstatic state of “filling the world with his frail existence,” Freud’s “oceanic feeling”: I can no longer, as before, throw myself headfirst into this vast ocean of nature, because my weakened and slackened faculties no longer find objects sufficiently defined, sufficiently settled, sufficiently within my reach to which they can strongly attach themselves, and because I no longer feel myself vigorous enough to swim in the chaos of my former ecstasies.67

In his seminal essay Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin describes the negative sense of liberty as “the answer to the question: What is the


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area within which the subject – a person or a group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be without interference by other persons?”68 As presented by Berlin, the concept of negative freedom differs in an important way from Rousseau’s willed negation of all actions, or the sense of annihilation he experienced or desired in the last years of his life. In addition, Rousseau’s comments on his reclaimed freedom maintain a fragile association between the sensible and the suprasensible world from which Kant would take pains to distance himself in his Critiques. The Rêveries describe a liminal space, where freedom is “cleared of everything that is only empirical,” to use Kant’s formulation, and yet expresses itself in the sensuous world of aimless wanderings or collecting plants. “Forced to abstain from thinking for fear of thinking about my misfortunes in spite of myself, forced to keep in check the remainders of a cheerful but languishing imagination,”69 Rousseau clung at the same time to the remains of an imaginary existence: I pass three-fourths of my life occupied with instructive and even agreeable objects in which I indulge my mind and my senses with delight, or with the children of my fancy whom I have created according to my heart.70

This reclaimed paternity best illustrates Rousseau’s use of negative freedom: not so much freedom as the sublime, but freedom as the sublimation of a long-endured necessity. No t e s 1 “Je ne vois pas qu’on puisse chercher la source du mal moral ailleurs que dans l’homme libre, perfectionné, partant corrompu.” Rousseau, Lettre à Voltaire, OC, vol. iv, p. 1060. Unless otherwise noted, translations are the author’s. 2 The Paris Parliament condemned Emile to be destroyed on June 9, 1762; on June 19, the Petit-Conseil of Geneva ordered both Emile and the Social Contract to be lacerated and burned by the Executioners of High Justice outside the doors of the Hôtel de Ville, as “reckless, scandalous, impious, and an attempt to destroy Christian religion and all governments.” Emile was banned in Bern on July 10, 1762 and in Rome on September 9, 1762. 3 OC, vol. i, p. 1545. 4 J.-J. Rousseau, Confessions, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly, 12 vols. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), vol. v, p. 493. 5 Rousseau, Emile, trans. B. Foxley, ed. and intro. P. D. Jimack (London: Dent, 1993), p. 532, translation modified. 6 Emile et Sophie, ou les solitaires, OC, vol. iv, p. 881. Emile’s first sentence is written as a counterpoint to Saint Preux’s letter to Julie: “O Heavenly powers

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you gave me a heart made for unhappiness; give me one made for felicity,” (book i, letter 5). 7 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 884. 8 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 896. 9 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 894. 10 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 899. 11 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 901. 12 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 904. 13 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 909. 14 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 918. 15 T. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 83, 85. 16 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. cliii. 17 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. clx. 18 Certainly Emile is resilient, and he uses terms strongly reminiscent of the Social Contract to describe his condition as slave, but the account Emile gives of this development is significant, too, in that Emile’s actions consist precisely in refusing to act. Few actually follow Emile’s example, and since Emile himself is sold to another master, the reader never learns the subsequent fate of the other slaves. 19 Quoted by Burgelin, OC, vol. iv, p. clxiii. 20 See Frédéric S. Eigeldinger’s recent edition of Emile et Sophie, ou, les solitaires (Paris: Champion, 2007), pp. 1, 18–22. 21 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 914. 22 Notes sur “De l’esprit”, OC, vol. iv, p. 1127. 23 Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (New York University Press, 1979), p. 78. 24 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 917. 25 Rousseau, Social Contract, ed. by L. G. Crocker, trans. by H. J. Tozer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), p. 11. 26 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 917. 27 Rousseau, The First and the Second Discourses, trans. by R. D. Masters and J. R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), p. 111. 28 P. D. Jimack’s introduction to Emile, p. xxv. 29 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 917. 30 Epictetus, The Discourses of Epictetus, trans. by T. W. Rolleston (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1947), p. 17. 31 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 917. 32 Rousseau, First and Second Discourses, p. 177. 33 See Jean Starobinski’s discussion of Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dürhing, in JeanJacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 44. 34 Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. by C. E. Butterworth (New York University Press, 1979), p. 6. 35 Rousseau, Reveries p. 80, translation modified, emphasis added. 36 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 80.


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37 A. Ronell, Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 97. 38 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 16. 39 S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. by J. Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), pp. 11–12. 40 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 20. 41 L. Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 19. 42 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 7. 43 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 481. 44 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 520. 45 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 236. 46 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 245. 47 Rousseau, Reveries, pp. 19–20. 48 Ronell, Finitude’s Score, p. 101. 49 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 34. 50 See Leo Damrosch’s description of and comments on the circumstances surrounding the writing of these texts in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), pp. 476–81. 51 I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. by P. Guyer, trans. by P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 151–2. 52 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 156. 53 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 83. Translation modified. 54 G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by H. Tomlinson, rev. edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 85. 55 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 85. 56 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 157. 57 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 1. 58 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 75. 59 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 82. 60 Plato, The Republic, trans. by B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 47. 61 Plato, Republic, p. 48. 62 Plato, Republic, p. 48. 63 Rousseau, Reveries, pp. 82–3. 64 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 83. 65 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 157. 66 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 95. 67 Rousseau, Reveries, pp. 95–6. 68 I. Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), p. 160. 69 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 95. 70 Rousseau, Reveries, p. 117.

C h a p t e r 17

Fail better: Rousseau’s creative délire Christie McDonald

I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do; and that is the freedom I have always laid claim to, often preserved, and most scandalized my contemporaries about.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker 1

Failure for Jean-Jacques Rousseau is not merely a sense of inadequacy; the celebrated opener of the Social Contract makes this clear: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”2 Failure is the basis on which Rousseau’s social, political, and personal thought rests. Yet his interpret ation of failure is as complex as are his ideas about freedom. A disjunction between facts and the concrete, on the one hand, and a utopian vision, on the other, galvanizes Rousseau’s political and social thought. He states that he only fully articulated the first principles of his work in his autobiographical writings, at the end of his life, when he linked his anthropological and sociopolitical thought to his own life-writing. These principles define the freedom not just to change or to reform thought, but to inaug urate a sense of self and society different from what came before. Within a sequence of autobiographical texts (including messages and letters), we see the principle of transformation in society commanded by Rousseau’s fatal diagnosis of culture, the way he engages not only with questions about rights and facts, and differing conceptions of authority, but also with freedom in relation to contemporary society. These works bring out the way in which Rousseau’s version of being a public intellectual disengaged him from sociopolitical attempts at integration, solidarity, and interrelatedness,3 and signaled the collapse of these ideals in what he saw around him. The structural failure of an “original” ethical relationship (however hypothetical) leads Rousseau to imagine a new kind of freedom and morality in society. But the disconnect between experience and the ideal finally brings Rousseau himself to repeat a similar failure in moments of the autobiographical works. 274

Fail better: Rousseau’s creative délire

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In his early anthropological works, Rousseau posited an ethical r elationship: an innate goodness of humankind based on the ability to sympathize with others. Rousseau dismissed the need for observed factual evidence from his method of thinking (“Let us set aside all the facts”) in order to create a hypothetical history of and/or philosophical meditation on the origins of society.4 A critique of contemporary culture lies at the heart of his endeavor and serves as the basis for newly conceived social relations; his imagined society of the Social Contract fuses the individual and collective in the general will (see Stanley Hoffmann’s chapter in this volume). Rousseau wrote his great sociopolitical works in the late 1750s and early 1760s. In the autobiographical works which followed, the narrative of personal failure (and a not-inconsequential dose of moral “trumping”) paves the way for individual as well as social critique, as in the Second Discourse, only here Rousseau serves as his own example. The theoretical implications of such a move nullified those philosophical positions based on what Mark Hulliung has called “failed concepts of human nature.”5 They were part of a “political secret” of the Enlightenment to which Reinhardt Koselleck points with “the politically crucial shift from inner moral freedom to outward political freedom.” Because the beginnings of this thought originated in a split between morality and politics, the private (for Rousseau, the certitude of conscience inherited from the state of nature) and the public, Koselleck argues that “[the secret] was concealed from most of the Enlighteners themselves.”6 Koselleck analyzes the way in which Enlightenment ceded to utopian impulses and explores long-term structures that created the conditions of possibility in the “post-theological age for maintaining the political and moral as separate spheres without being able to reconcile the two.”7 He discusses the history of criticism and critique as it first “served the church, based on Revelation, [then] … a Cartesian model of clear and distinct ideas of rational thought.”8 It was Pierre Bayle who split reason off from revelation, making two separate domains, and criticism became that of reason: negotiating contradictions and aporias. Koselleck’s twentiethcentury view summarizes eloquently how “criticism transformed the future into a maelstrom that sucked out the present from under the feet of the critic.”9 Rousseau’s use of “critique” follows the general use of the term. In 1694, the French word “critique” meant, as a noun, the art of judging and, as an adjective, the day when a crisis arises. By 1798, the idea of a sharp censorship of others’ behavior was added. In JeanFrançois Marmontel’s Encyclopédie article “Critique,” the role of the critic

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was broadened to include moral guidance on conflicting opinions and mores.10 Marmontel even laments the way in which philosophers underestimate the pragmatic influence their criticism could have, thus flagging the p roblem of practical visibility. If Marmontel was right, that Rousseau was immured to the impact of his own refusal of contemporary society (although not to the enmity between him and his friends, notably Denis Diderot), then his withdrawal to idealized or abstracted positions nevertheless ensured the survival of his thought beyond the turbulent circumstances of his own era. From the anthropological works, to reconfigurations of social and political life, to a last autobiographical period, Rousseau’s thought offers no easy bridge or transition from one sphere to the other. Indeed, his writing offers no practicable social alternative to his contemporaries, neither in his longer narratives, Emile and Julie, or the New Heloïse, nor in the Social Contract. Rousseau reflects upon the relationship of the moral to the political more explicitly than Koselleck’s general statements would allow, invoking sentiment rather than reason in his critiques. What we may understand Rousseau to have inaugurated is a complex pitting of the political against personal freedom, the social against the singular. Isaiah Berlin formulated this problem for political theory: “What then must the minimum [area of personal freedom] be? That which a man cannot give up without offending against the essence of his human nature,” and “What is this essence?”11 These questions find personal responses in Rousseau’s last works, through interaction – conceived both as participation and withdrawal – with the culture around him. T h e au t obio g r a ph ic a l Because feeling defines existence in Rousseau’s view, he relies on comparison and the reinforcement of subjective experience, in the example of another, to render objective truth. In the sketches for the Confessions, he lays out a strategy for proving the rectitude of his own moral insights in a series of fragments.12 First, it is necessary to situate the self in the “moral order” (“ordre moral”) and “to know at least one fellow creature in order to distinguish what in one’s heart belongs to the species and what to the individual.”13 Many people believe they know others, he observes, as the erroneous judgments of him by contemporaries attest. Without an interior model to pass from the individual to transcendent truth – as provided in St. Augustine’s autobiography – the secular self seems condemned to false sincerity or mistaken (even at times malevolent)


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judgment. Rousseau touches here on the relationship between biography and autobiography, relating the two in a complex choreography. If one is able to judge others by oneself, then proof requires that one know at least one other in order to avoid error. And this leads Rousseau to his skillful defense of confessional truth: I would like to see to it that, in order to appreciate oneself and value, there be at least a comparison piece: each person can know himself and another, and this other will be myself.14

Making himself into his own “comparison piece,” Rousseau turns away from others (beginning a period in which he becomes more and more isolated), and creates his own truth by writing in the present about his own past: I am writing the life of a man who is no longer, someone known to no other living soul but myself, and who was worth knowing. This man is myself. Readers, read this work carefully, for whether it is well or badly done, it is one of a kind.15

The Confessions, written in the 1760s, were originally intended to comprise three parts, but Rousseau abandoned the work after Part ii. From 1772 to 1774, he then wrote the Dialogues, his most eccentric and unapproachable, some even say “delirious” work (a term to which I shall return). The protagonists – Rousseau (a faithful reader), and a relatively well intentioned Frenchman (who ponders the misinformation and venom propagated by Rousseau’s contemporaries) – raise questions about “Jean-Jacques,” the writer and person, recasting in moral polarities the implications of autobiography: what kind of man writes immoral books? Is Jean-Jacques a good man? These are the questions to which the work obsessively returns. Having mapped out the retrospective structure of the Confessions in the Ebauches, the Dialogues split in two the speaking voices and exile to a third position the subject of debate and ideal model, Jean-Jacques. The Dialogues, like Julie, or the New Heloïse, offer a rationale for reforming the social contract among individuals without radically chan ging either human nature or the political structure. Fighting isolation and silence, the Dialogues integrate the point of view of the other in the narrative of the Frenchman. The goal of the work is in a sense to delineate an accurate portrait of Jean-Jacques. Two versions of “reality” and “the facts” emerge, one presumed to be true, the other false. Through these exchanges, and a fragmented narrative of discovery and corrected judgment, Rousseau modifies the sense of absolute liberty that Isaiah Berlin and others have argued constitutes Rousseau’s only view.16 As Rousseau

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inscribes the gaze of others within his work and turns this “ethnographic imagination” on himself, he finds a private space that never completely loses contact with community. Rousseau’s distinctions between an underlying ethics and civic morality are shared by Emmanuel Lévinas, who separates the two. Morality for Lévinas consists of a series of rules about social behavior and civic duty in the sociopolitical realm, and deals with the organization and betterment of human survival; ethics, grounded in a prior ethical responsibility to the other, can neither make rules nor become manifest, but without it the sociopolitical realm becomes subject to every sort of abuse. Rousseau anticipated Lévinas in recognizing the need for both an underlying ethics and civic morality.17 In this sense, the argument of the Dialogues recapitulates the structure of Rousseau’s great theoretical texts – as Michel Foucault observed (for different reasons) in an introduction to a 1962 edition of the Dialogues – by creating a foundation for something yet to exist, formed and regained from a forgotten nature to be transformed, all of which simultaneously legitimates and justifies that very existence.18 Rousseau writes the fictive dialogue in order to triumph over silence and overcome injustice; so interlocutor Rousseau questions the Frenchman about his opinions of Jean-Jacques, breaking the silence in a way that the author contended his contemporaries did not. Rousseau interpreted this silence as the mystery of a plot enveloping him in the intolerance of others. Foucault saw in this work more than the quest of a man under surveillance to liberate himself by entering into the system of justice-victimhood. What interested him before the publication of Madness and Civilization: A History of the Clinic in the Age of Reason (1972) and the later Discipline and Punish (1975, 1977), was the interiorization of an exclusion that demanded to be understood and analyzed, as the Dialogues obsessively makes clear (see the chapter in this volume by Leo Damrosch). Ten years out from Emile, Julie, and the Social Contract, Rousseau writes in the Dialogues not only about the difficulties of expressing the self intimately revealed in the Confessions, but especially about the inability to control others’ judgment and, consequently, the reception and posterity of his work. Yet, in the end, the Dialogues leave incomplete the attempt to reconcile public opinion with the “intent” of the man and his work. Like the Confessions, the Dialogues ultimately fail to achieve closure: the particular truth of the individual eludes comprehension; reason proves inadequate to the connection of self and other. Rousseau thus reaches a point of no return, a state that reveals not only paranoia at the psychological level but also a rupture that finally allows him some sense of inner


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freedom in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. If Rousseau’s goal was to find an infallible inner space to which one might return (“conscience”), a space coextensive with the most positive aspects of the social and political sphere, only his last work, the Reveries, gives a glimpse of what that might have been like: “Moi seul,” the opening words of the Reveries, return the self to its inner freedom, though it remains nevertheless forever linked to others. N e g o t i at i ng p o s i t i v e a n d n e g at i v e l i be r t y In a transitional text dated 1757, composed at the same time as his Moral Letters,19 Rousseau expresses ambivalence about the relation of the individual self to society. He writes to Countess Sophie d’Houdetot, the woman about whose dramatic arrival in the midst of writing Julie, or the New Heloïse, he recounts in Book ix of the Confessions. But Rousseau quickly confuses Sophie with the character Julie, and Julie with Sophie. The six published letters deal with the failure of love and the need to reestablish a sense of order; they serve as a moral lesson, much like the second half of Julie, to counterbalance his impossible passion for her (shadowing the characters Saint Preux and Julie). The 1757 letter, left out of the Pléaide edition and only later re-edited by Jean Starobinski,20 takes up the vexed relationship between self and other. Leaving behind the notion of an isolated life that Rousseau had theorized for primitive man, he addresses himself to the “new existence” of the individual. Having lost his original independence as artificial social relationships developed, contemporary man now has new needs and desires, and must be transformed to adapt to this situation.21 Each depends for his freedom, security, and happiness on others. Maintaining order in society is now a key priority. By curbing the excesses of the passions, man obeys a higher command, allowing his soul to soar toward virtue. Rousseau writes the critical passage of this letter when he reiterates the necessity, stressed from the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences to the Dialogues, to return to oneself (“rentrer en soi”) and thereby retrieve human essence by consulting the “heart.”22 Yet, in contrast to the descriptions in the anthropological works, this letter suggests that the process of returning to the self reveals existence to be highly social in the relation of self to others.23 By distinguishing what constitutes society from its abuses, the sense of a debt contracted with society emerges, not only among individuals, but in general and in common with all others. Put another way, the failure of the individual (because of excess amour propre or a herd

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mentality in worshipping appearances (“paraître”)) generates the need to start over, to reset the human switch through which a commitment to the strength of community begins. The signs of human imperfectibility (quirks, flaws, missteps) do not indicate that self-interest could become the basis of social relations for Rousseau. Nor could abdication of freedom: “To renounce one’s freedom is to renounce one’s status as a man, the rights of humanity, and even its duties.”24 Rather, freedom must be viewed at another level – one parallel to or indicative of an earlier time – now readjusted to accommodate a new life, bringing society “as it is” more in line with society as it “ought to be.” Perhaps this is at least partially why Rousseau draws upon metaphors of slavery to exhort fellow Europeans to think about freedom and “remain aloof to [an] Atlantic slave trade” contemporaneous, as Christopher L. Miller puts it, with Rousseau’s writing of the Social Contract.25 Perhaps this is also why Rousseau turns to music from the past (emblematic of man’s primitive state) to reconfigure the present and provide alternative experiments in how to model change. T h e fa l l i ng a r t of m us ic In theory and in practice, music provides important access to what constitutes being and defines humanity in the foundation of Rousseau’s polit ical and social thought. Rousseau was involved with music at many levels throughout his life: from his theory of the origins of society in music and language in Essay on the Origin of Languages, to his directly musical writings – Dictionary of Music (1749–1764), Dissertation on Modern Music (1742), Letter on French Music (1753), On the Origin of Melody – all published together in volume v of the Pléiade edition of the Œuvres complètes works. Of his own musical compositions, the best-known is Le Devin du village, performed at Fontainebleau in 1752. Rousseau’s musical theory rests on the idea that music is constituted not from physical sounds in harmony (Rameau’s view), but through melody, which converts immediate sensation to a spiritual realm. Melody is central to music as a moral art, for it depends on the imitation neither of words nor of things, but of feeling. All of these works link language, music, and society; together they constitute a loosely knit discourse on method. What did music mean to Rousseau? As he defines it in the Dictionary of Music, music combines sounds, as the art of beauty, and decency following Quintilian. Rousseau sidesteps a common etymology of the word


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music coming from the muses (Latin musica taken from the classical Greek mousikē, placing it (with Diodore) in Egypt, with the sound of reeds). What interests Rousseau is the relation of song to language in human history. The ancients revered music: Plato believed that changes in music signaled change within the state; the early Israelites inscribed moral principles and love of virtue through music; high-minded ideas and lofty feelings were honed through the dignity of music and language. But “Music is fallen today,” Rousseau writes, “fallen from its power and majesty to a point where we doubt the truth of its once marvelous effects.”26 Where once the Phrygian mode could excite and the Lydian model calm, Rousseau sees only physical reactions from modern music. He describes a woman (“de condition”), for example, who cannot listen to music without bursting into involuntary and convulsive laughter (possibly a forerunner of Marcel Proust’s Madame Verdurin).27 Yet, the astonishing effects of music could still be felt in the celebrated “Ranz [rans] des vaches”:28 that Tune so cherished by the Swiss that they have forbidden it from being played by their Troops on pain of death, since it would cause those who heard it to dissolve in tears, desert, or die, so much would it arouse in them the ardent desire to see their country again.29

Nothing for Rousseau in contemporary music could produce such an impact. The arrival of culture in Rousseau’s hypothetical history of humankind marks the tipping point in the progressive degeneration of existence, which early on divides music from language. Whence his “nostalgia” for the Greek language, the discourse of which he presumes resembled chant; for la neume, vocalization formed from chant without words; and for plain-chant, that which survives in ecclesiastical chant from ancient Greek music. He deplores the slippage from accent 30 to analysis in written notation, accompanied by the falling apart of melody into harmony, “separating song from speech so much that these two languages combat one another, contradict one another, deprive each other of every characteristic of truth.”31 Rousseau proposes a contemporary rehabilitation of music through the recitative and the introduction of music into theater intended to reunite song and speech and the imitation of feeling (see also the chapter in this volume by Tracy B. Strong): The Greeks could sing while speaking; but among us it is necessary to speak or to sing – both cannot be done at the same time. It is this very distinction that

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makes it so that we need Recitative … Now, the Recitative is the only means of union between Song and speech.32

With the Recitative,33 Rousseau evokes enharmonic equivalencies: the respelling of a note with a changing function, or the same note with two uses, such as C-sharp and D-flat.34 Enharmonic transitions become the exquisite (if impossible) means for making melody conform to the accidentals of oratory; declamation in music thus imitates the inflections of the voice. Rousseau explains in the Dictionary of Music that the effect of the enharmonic practice can be found in a “sublime” and “pathetic” scene whereby the voice must multiply and vary its inflections to imitate “accent.” Now, if all this is well and good theoretically, the exemplary work that Rousseau cites for the renewal of music in Recitative is his very own Le Devin du village. Yet the Dialogues evoke the controversy surrounding his very status as a musician. Channeled through “the Frenchman,” the invectives of his contemporaries include accusations that “Jean-Jacques” was ignorant of music, an impostor, and a plagiarist. In this work, Rousseau sets about to “prove” that “Jean-Jacques,” the author Rousseau, and the composer of Le Devin are one and the same: a good man, who wrote good works. Here was, he claims, pitch-perfect writing possessing “the right tone and none other.”35 He even suggests that there might be two Jean-Jacques: the first, not only musically accomplished but an innovator in music; the second, a shy and fierce music copyist incapable of writing the works he pretends to have composed. The question he intends to answer is: which is the true Rousseau? And we know who is meant to win out. However, Rousseau recounts a curious scene in Book iv of the Confessions, where he pretended to be a musician. Let us examine this scene. Rousseau tells us in Book iii of the Confessions that he became starstruck by and a fanatic fan of a singer, Venture de Villeneuve, whom he met in Annecy at the home of his beloved Madame de Warens (“Maman”). Venture is presented as no less a man of paradox than Rousseau himself: Parisian, debauched, hunchbacked, yet communicating such a noble air and so brilliant and musically gifted that he didn’t need to study or read music. Rousseau describes a misadventure that he categorizes as a “delirious moment” when the self leaves itself. Imagining himself to be just like Venture (“venturisé,” as he puts it), who became a voice teacher without any musical knowledge, he transports himself into his idol: “He had called himself Venture de Villeneuve; I made an anagram of the name Rousseau in that of Vaussore, and I called myself Vaussore de Villeneuve.”36 To show off his (non-)talent, he puts on a concert at the


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home of a professor of law and music lover, M. de Treytorens. For the occasion, he composes a piece on which he tacks a little minuet – well known on the street – for which he exchanges the dirty lyrics Venture had taught him as a mnemonic device. The scene is set; the musicians assemble; the moment of the concert arrives; he begins to conduct: No, since French Operas have existed, you have not in your life heard a similar din. Whatever they might have thought of my pretended talent, the effect was worse than anything they seemed to expect.37

Rousseau, perspiring heavily, feels trapped and unable to flee; the musicians break up laughing; the audience caps their ears to shut out the sound. Rousseau concludes: “This is unbearable; what outrageous music!” What kind of confession is this? Unable to read a note, pretending to be a musician from Paris, where he pointedly tells the reader he has never been, Rousseau maps out the worst scenario for change. Not only does he betray his presumed good nature, but he indulges the illusion that liberty is a function of what one wishes to be. He swells with pride and a false sense of virtue, as he appears to do more than to change: “The noblest pride sprang up on the ruins of uprooted vanity. I play acted nothing; I in fact became what I appeared to be.”38 The autobiographer describes how things can run amok if change is attempted in appearance only. After all, Rousseau had envisaged changing human nature (but more profoundly) in the Social Contract, where, by leaving natural independence for dependence in the social bond, a new state might be achieved.39 But Rousseau may also be dramatizing in this narrative the notion that humans may need to change for the worse before they can change for the better. Previously, I read this scene by looking at the two ways that Rousseau had determined that one could come to know truth:40 through either immediate intuition or a sequence of negations (a consequence of becoming part of contemporary society). Idolatry and posturing seemed to flip him into the opposite of his original goodness and innocence, giving a clear choice between Rousseau as either passionate music lover or complete impostor (the binary logic he evoked in the Dialogues). But he could not be both at once. So the scene invents a new, false identity whose effects can now be traced; Jean Starobinski, following up on Marcel Raymond’s analysis, refers to this maneuver as an act of magic.41 Indeed, the implications of this anecdote go well beyond Rousseau’s technical ability in music. They involve testing the chance for personal redemption in a postlapsarian albeit secular world (and reformulating in narrative Machivelli’s ironic credo that the “true way of going to Paradise would be to learn

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the road to Hell in order to avoid it”42). To imagine truly living in music, and thereby to restore the plenitude of self, would be the equivalent in writing of composing a Recitative: finding unity simultaneously in music and within the self. Yet what Rousseau describes in this scene remains perplexing. Yes, the fiasco of the “concert” presents a humiliating revelation to others, not only of his incompetence, but of the necessity within the Confessions to reveal it. And one thing remains clear: neither those present at the reading described at the end of Book xii, nor his presumed readers could ever ignore, or even remain neutral, about his existence after the Confessions. Beyond that, however, failure in this parodic musical offering forecasts the thesis that Rousseau later develops in the Dialogues: however much his enemies may have meant to undermine his (Jean-Jacques’s) legitimacy as a thinker, writer, and musician, the exercise of free speech in his own dogged defense promised to restore it. The success of that process, as an act of writing, whatever the failure underlying it, gave Rousseau, as narrator, control at least of an unfolding narrative in which music played an important part. Music may not be what it was either in ancient Greece or in Rousseau’s imagined idyllic beginnings for humanity, with the emotional force of song and poetry,43 but it could revive that sense of a past regained both practically and theoretically. Beyond Rousseau’s failure as a composer and musician, the scene from the Confessions signals a complex social prognostic: it would take more than appearance (“le paraître”) to reverse the fallen state of society, and also more than imitation (here, idolatry). Rousseau’s participation in the “falling” art of music shows a misguided attempt at critique: to prove the hollowness of contemporary music within society. More importantly, Rousseau cannot assume cultural failure as a general problem to better reveal its disastrous effects; the anecdote is simply too idiomatic. I now believe that a key to this scene can be found in the Second Discourse, where Rousseau evokes at least two meanings of the term délire. On the one hand, he uses “délire” to indicate the delusion of reason and intelligence in the false promise of freedom through perfectibility and progress.44 On the other, he describes a transformative sense of délire, describing the state of agitation into which he fell on his way to visit Denis Diderot in prison at Vincennes, when the subject of the Second Discourse came to him in a flash of illumination (the celebrated scene known as the “Illumination de Vincennes”).45 In Book ix of the Confessions, the term unleashes the power of literary creativity to turn


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from the real to the imaginary46 and involves the creation of the character Julie in relation to Madame d’Houdetot – to whom the “Moral Letters” are addressed. Music, as both a theory and practice of creativity, enabled Rousseau to go further in his reflection on freedom and perhaps distance himself from the more traditional definitions of freedom that appear in the Encyclopédie. Moral freedom (as distinct from natural, political, or civil) is defined in an unattributed article as having not to do with adherence to truth or evidence, or even indulgence in falsehood. It is defined as follows: “Freedom for an intelligent being is in function of his power to do what he wants, in accord with his own determination.”47 If Rousseau suggests that freedom may be defined as never doing what one does not want to – the double negative of the epigraph above from the Sixth Promenade of the Reveries – it was perhaps because at some level he was arguing against the confusion of terms such as “determin ation” for “freedom,” caught between the sense of “will” and freedom as choice.48 Rousseau sought a freedom of creativity and innovation that could only come with detachment from facts and the concrete real ities that tormented him. Countering mechanistic determinism – whose equivalent was sound without sentiment (harmony) – music could serve as a metaphor for social freedom reminiscent of primitive history prior to the social pact; music in this sense is memorial. It also provides a path to self-creation. When Rousseau/Vaussore/Venture fails in his delirium to make good music, he has no rules to follow, nor has he yet invented any new ones: “J. J. was born for music. Not to be consumed in its execution, but to speed its progress and make discoveries about it.”49 Does having dedicated himself to a role so totally that he no longer had any will, having recounted its most extreme and ludicrous end, somehow disallow any form of freedom, because it is involuntary, like magic, as Starobinski suggests? I would answer that this is so partially, and in relation to the hero whose life is recounted, not to the narrator. Failure here signals importantly the very power of a story, or fiction, to create the basis for the reinvention of self as well as society. Only two pages later in the Confessions, Rousseau mentions the project of Julie for the first time, a novel in which not only is there a doubling of his own life experience with Madame d’Houdetot’s, but the articulation of the key relationship between the individual and society. The scene of the crazily mounted concert is without question a failure. The Confessions, too, end with a description of a failed reading in Book xii, when his audience remains stone silent. From the early through the middle and late works, each a

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narrative of how life in the present fails, the narrator sets the stage for something new to come: an alternative to contemporary sociopolitical conditions is presented in the Social Contract, Emile, and Julie, and the splitting of the self in the Dialogues. Perhaps Rousseau could not invent in music because the form of delirious idolatry described in the Lausanne concert, where he becomes other, presents a double whammy: lack of knowledge in the service of self-interest can bring neither social freedom nor the kind of power to invent within the moral sphere that Rousseau assigned to himself. Yet Rousseau incessantly repeats his defense of Jean-Jacques in the Dialogues: he was a competent composer, had written the opera Le Devin du village, a work as pure as the others written by Jean-Jacques. Music provided a kind of litmus test for Rousseau’s view of himself – unique among his contemporaries for his views, his life, and his work – at the same time that it carried with it significant moral and social meaning in recalling an origin that had promised a better life. That that life was not to materialize within Rousseau’s lifetime was not a measure of the effect his works would have within sociopolitical as well as literary thought thereafter. How different is the description of his Devin du village in the Dialogues, in which the effect is said to demonstrate music’s renewed power to move the audience: The public’s enthusiasm, reaching delirium, bears witness to the sublimity of this work. Jean-Jacques was divine, he was a modern Orpheus; this opera was a masterpiece of art and of the human mind.50

This hyperbolic defense of the Dialogues gives way in the Reveries to a fragile sense of peace: living day by day, music accompanies him as it always has in one form or another – now emptied of content, in the work of copyist. In this way, music not only provided the transition from abstract concept to a narrative of personal experience but also gave hope for change. I have begun to think that what Beckett wrote in Worstword Ho can be applied to the sense of freedom Rousseau attempted to negotiate for individuals, first among them himself: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”51 For if Rousseau’s celebrated definition of political freedom as a “law which we prescribe to ourselves”52 had theor etical traction in his sociopolitical works, his autobiographical works let us glimpse the never-ending difficulty of achieving the freedom needed for self-creation.


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No t e s 1 Rousseau, “Reveries of the Solitary Walker,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. by R. D. Masters and C. Kelly, 12 vols. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), vol. viii, p. 56. 2 Rousseau, “Social Contract,” in Collected Writings, vol. iv, p. 131. 3 These were the themes for reflection at the conference Concatenations, organized by Yves Citton at the University of Pittsburgh in 2002. 4 Referring to deductive reasoning rather than conjecture, Rousseau excludes other possible scenarios and dispenses reflection “concerning the impossibility, on the one hand, for one to destroy certain hypotheses, although, on the other, one cannot give them the degree of certainty of facts; concerning how, when two facts given as real are to be connected by a series of intermediate facts which are unknown or considered as such, it is up to history, when it exists, to present the facts that connect them; while it is up to Philosophy, when history is lacking, to determine similar facts that might connect them.” Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 42. 5 M. Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the “Philosophes” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 59. 6 R. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 2, 85. 7 Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, p. 2. 8 Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, p. 107. 9 Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, p. 109. 10 Marmontel, “Critique,” in D. Diderot and J. d’Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de letters (ARTFL Project, University of Chicago, 2006). Online at www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc/. 11 I. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 126. 12 Confessions, OC, vol. i, pp. 1148–72. 13 “Il faudrait connaître outre soi du moins un de ses semblables, afin de démêler dans son propre cœur ce qui est de l’espèce et ce qui est de l’individu.” Ebauches des confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 1158. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise indicated. 14 “Je veux tâcher que pour apprendre à s’apprécier, on puisse avoir du moins une pièce de comparaison; que chacun puisse connaître soi et un autre, et cet autre ce sera moi.” Ebauche des confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 1158. 15 “J’écris la vie d’un homme qui n’est plus, mais que j’ai bien connu, qu’une âme vivante n’a connu que moi et qui mérita de l’être. Cet homme c’est moi même. Lecteurs, lisez attentivement cet ouvrage; car bien ou mal fait il est unique en son espèce.” Ebauche des confessions, OC, vol. i, p. 1159. 16 “Liberty for [Rousseau] is an absolute value. He looks on liberty as if it were a kind of religious concept. For him, liberty is identical with the human individual himself. To say that a man is a man, and to say that he is

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free, are almost the same.” I. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, ed. by H. Hardy (London: Chatto and Windus, 2002), p. 31. 17 E. Lévinas, “De la phénoménologie à l’éthique: entretien avec Emmanuel Lévinas,“ Esprit, 234 (1997), pp. 136–7. 18 M. Foucault, “Introduction,” in J.-J. Rousseau, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques: dialogues (Paris: A. Colin, 1962). See also, M. Foucault, Dits et écrits: 1954– 1988, ed. by D. Defert and F. Ewald, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. iii, pp. 172–88. 19 Rousseau, Lettres morales, ed. by C. Morana (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2002). 20 Rousseau, “Lettre sur la vertu, l’individu et la société,” ed. by J. Starobinski and C. Wirz, Annales de la société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 41 (1997), pp. 313–28. 21 “It seems to me … that whatever is moral in me always seeks relations outside myself, and that, had I always lived alone, I would possess neither vice nor virtue and would be good only by dint of the absolute goodness that causes a thing to be whatever its nature requires.“ J.-J. Rousseau, “A Letter from JeanJacques Rousseau,” intro. by J. Starobinski, trans. by A. Goldhammer, New York Review of Books, 50 (2003); Rousseau, “Lettre sur la vertu,” p. 325. 22 I wish to thank Ioannis Evrigenis for conversations about the similarity between Rousseau’s sense of failure, necessity, and rupture, and Machiavelli’s. In particular, the notion of a psychological (as well as political) recalling of the self, rentrer en soi is very close to si riconoschino: “It is thus necessary, as was said, that men who live together in any order whatever often examine themselves either through these extrinsic accidents or through intrinsic ones.” N. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. by H. C. Mansfield and N. Tarcov (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 210. The sense of beginning anew shows a surprising similarity between Rousseau and Machiavelli. See I. D. Evrigenis, “Hobbes’s Clockwork: The State of Nature and Machiavelli’s Return to the Beginnings of Cities,” in The Art of Rule: Essays in Honor of Harvey Mansfield, ed. by S. Krause and M. A. McGrail (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), and Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 2008). 23 “We all feel that happiness is not within ourselves but depends on the things around us. The luxury that draws upon all of nature, the ambition that seeks to bring the universe to heel, the sensual pleasure that solitude reduces to nothing, the vanity that covets all eyes, the goodness that would make happiness universal – everything that engages our interest depends on foreign objects; all our vows evaporate; the only happiness we enjoy is that which others ascribe to us; and we would sooner not exist than go unnoticed. In a word, whether it be the need to love or the desire to please, friendship, trust, or pride, the habit of engaging in commerce with others makes such commerce so necessary that we may doubt that there exists a single person who, assured of having all his wishes granted, would not sink into despair if


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assured at the same time of never seeing another human being again.” “Such are the indissoluble bonds that unite us all and make our existence, our survival, our reason [lumières], our fortune, our happiness, and, in general, all our goods and evils dependent on our social relations.” Rousseau, “Letter from Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” 24 Rousseau, “Social Contract,” in Collected Writings, vol. iv, p. 135. 25 C. L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 69. 26 Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 922. 27 “I know a woman of station in Paris who cannot listen to any Music without being seized with involuntary and convulsive laughter. One also reads in the History of the Academy of Sciences of Paris that a Musician was cured from a violent fever by a Concert played in his bedroom.” Rousseau, “Dictionary of Music,” in Collected Writings, vol. vii, p. 443. 28 “Ranz-des-vaches: a celebrated tune among the Swiss, whose young shepherds play it on the bagpipes while they herd their livestock in the mountains … See the article on MUSIC where mention is made of the strange effects of this melody.” Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. v, p. 1006. For the musical score, see OC, vol. v, p. 1190. 29 “One would seek in vain in this Tune the energetic accents capable of producing such astonishing effects. These effects, which do not take place on foreigners, come solely from habit, from memories, from a thousand circumstances which, recounted by this Tune to those who hear it and recalling for them their country, their old pleasures, their youth, and all their ways of living, arouse in them a bitter pain for having lost all that. The Music [sic] therefore does not precisely act as Music [sic], but as a memorative sign … So true is it that it is not in their physical action that the greatest effects of Sounds on the human heart must be sought!” Rousseau, “Dictionary of Music,” in Collected Writings, vol. vii, p. 445. 30 “Thus is called, according to the most general acceptation, every modification of the speaking voice with regard to its duration, or to the tone of the syllables and of the words of which the discourse is composed – which shows a very exact relationship between the two uses of Accents [sic] and the two parts of Melody, namely Rhythm and Intonation.” Rousseau, “Dictionary of Music,” in Collected Writings, vol. vii, p. 71. This is the account of the affective power of the human voice that the Essai sur l’origine des langues proposes and then modifies, set in the context of the “heart” communicating to the “heart” of the Dialogues. See M. O’Dea, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Music, Illusion, and Desire (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), pp. 191, 209; See Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. v, p. 408. For music in Julie, see OC, vol. ii, p. 132. 31 Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” in Collected Writings, vol. vii, p. 323. 32 Rousseau, “Dictionary of Music,” in Collected Writings, vol. vii, pp. 460–1, translation modified.

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33 “Recitative: [a masterpiece of the Musician’s art, by which in an] accomplished recitative, he joins the most touching melody to all the vehemence of declamation without ever confusing the one with the other. I could display for you the innumerable beauties of that admirable recitative of which so many accounts are given in France which are as absurd as the judgments which people presume to pass on them – as if someone could deliver a verdict on a recitative without knowing profoundly the language to which it belongs. But to enter into those details it would, so to speak, be necessary to create a new Dictionary, to invent terms at each instant in order to offer to French readers ideas unknown to them and address discourses to them which would seem to be gibberish to them. In a word, in order to be understood it would be necessary to speak to them in a language they understood, and consequently of science and of arts of every genre, except Music alone. I will therefore not go into an affected detail in this matter which would do nothing for the instruction of Readers and concerning which they might presume that I owe the apparent force of my proofs only to their ignorance in this area.” Rousseau, “Letter on French Music,” in Collected Writings, vol. vii, p. 167. 34 See the entry “Enharmonique,” in the “Dictionary of Music,” in Collected Writings, vol. vii. 35 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 21, translation modified. 36 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 124. 37 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 125. 38 Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 350. 39 “One who dares to undertake the founding of a people should feel that he is capable of changing human nature, so to speak; of transforming each individual, who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole from which this individual receives, in a sense, his life and his being; of altering man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature.” Rousseau, “Social Contract,” in Collected Writings, vol. iv, p. 155. 40 See “En-harmoniques: l’anagramme de Rousseau,” in C. V. McDonald, Dispositions: quatres essais sur les écrits de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Proust, et Jacques Derrida (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1986). 41 See J. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 79; see also OC, vol. i, p. 149 n4. 42 Letter from Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Guicciardini, May 17, 1521, in The Portable Machiavelli (New York: Viking, 1979), p. 22. 43 See Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. vii, p. 787. 44 “As all the progress of the human Species continually moves it farther away from its primitive state, the more new knowledge we accumulate, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important know ledge of all; so that it is, in a sense, by dint of studying man that we have


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made ourselves incapable of knowing him.” Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,” in Collected Writings, vol. iii, p. 12. 45 “What I do recall very distinctly on this occasion is that, when I arrived at Vincennes, I was in an agitation that bordered on delirium. Diderot noticed it; I told him its cause, and I read him the prosopopeia of Fabricius written in pencil under an Oak. He exhorted me to give vent to my ideas and to compete for the prize. I did so, and from that instant I was lost.” Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 295. 46 “The impossibility of reaching real beings threw me into the country of chimeras, and seeing nothing existing that was worthy of my delirium, I nourished it in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings in accordance with my heart.” Rousseau, “Confessions,” in Collected Writings, vol. v, p. 359. 47 “Liberté,” in Diderot and d’Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie, vol. ix, p. 462, emphasis added. Online at www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/ encyc/. 48 Jacques Proust shows that for the Encyclopédie, the articles on liberty (nat ural, civic, and political) were particularly unenlightening. He does not, however, refer to “Liberté morale.” J. Proust, Diderot et l’“Encyclopédie”, 3rd edn. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), pp. 312–13. 49 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 164. 50 Rousseau, “Dialogues,” in Collected Writings, vol. i, p. 18, emphasis added. 51 S. Beckett, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1983), p. 7. 52 Rousseau, “Social Contract,” in Collected Writings, vol. iv, p. 142.

Postface: Rousseau and freedom Stanley Hoffmann

Many writers have examined, over the years, Rousseau’s views on f reedom. One of the most compelling scrutinies is Judith Shklar’s Men and Citizens.1 Her analysis of the “positive freedom” of citizenship in the ideal community of the Social Contract is superb. The mul tiple requirements Rousseau sets up for the community of the Social Contract make it clear that he did not believe it could be a widely relevant solution to the problem of political liberty – liberty in the polis – within the corrupt world of modern civilization he never ceased to denounce. Shklar has a great deal to say about “men” (and women) in that world. We would like to add some thoughts to her penetrating analysis. Can one approximate being a “citizen,” if one is forced to live in a corrupt society ridden with inequalities, in which human beings never stop comparing themselves to others and are rarely treated as possible participants in public life? An examination of what could be called “men and women in actual modern societies” leads to a gloomy conclusion: liberty-in-society remains elusive, however hard one tries to protect the individual from the multiple defects so eloquently denounced in the two Discourses. Two examples will suffice. The first is the case of Emile. On the one hand, his tutor – a thoroughly admirable, if faceless, person – tries to safeguard, or to bring out, l’ homme de la nature in his tutee, and to rescue him from the evils of his time and his society by what Rousseau calls “negative education,” so that he will be able to stay “close to his natural condition” and to practice those “first movements of nature” which are “always right.” But Emile has to pay a heavy price: he becomes the product of his tutor’s wisdom; he must believe that he is always the master, and it must always be you [the tutor] who are. There is no submission so perfect as that which preserves the appearance of freedom; thus, one captures even the will.2 292

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It is as if the only choice of the poor boy were between becoming like the other products of a bad society – vices and all – the slaves of public opinion, et al., or else becoming putty in the tutor’s hands, so that, when the time comes for Emile to stand on his own feet, he must exhort his tutor: “O my friend, my protector, my master! Take back the authority that you want to give up at the very moment I most need it to persist.”3 Added to this, the contrast between fundamentally good “nature” and the Fall represented by civilization is not as clear as Rousseau seems to believe. Poor Sophie is to be educated for a man because, in Rousseau’s view, this is what nature has destined women for. That this view is itself a result of centuries of submissiveness inculcated by men and churches is not an idea that Rousseau entertains. What is, then, the result of this so carefully delineated education? The marriage of Emile and Sophie is a failure. In Emile et Sophie, ou les solitaires, Emile becomes a captive of “barbaresque” brigands – and that experience teaches him that if liberty means doing what one wants, nobody is free; all men are weak, depend on things, on harsh necessity; and whoever best knows wanting all that it commands, is the most free, since he is never forced to do what he doesn’t want … I never had as much authority over myself as when I was in the barbarians’ chains.4

Let us move from Emile to Julie. In the society in which she lives, she is torn between the call of love – to a man whose two flaws are that he is socially somewhat below her, and humanly much weaker than she turns out to be – and the yoke of duty. Had she followed passion, she would have given up her position and obligations. By marrying the formidable Wolmar, one more incarnation of the lucid, righteous, all-knowing master – after the Legislator and the anonymous tutor – she lives in what Rousseau presents (or seems to present) as the best possible mini-society within the bigger, corrupt one. It is, on the surface, a happy, productive, and humane set of arrangements. But it is also the triumph of paternalism. Wolmar is a wise master: those who work under him are well treated. But there is a strict hierarchy, and each one is supposed to remain in his or her place. We are very far indeed from the social equality of the Social Contract, and the whole enterprise rests on one cool and fair man’s vision – the vision of someone who, as Shklar puts it, is “like god” (“the reason [he] does not believe in God is that he is God to all intents and purposes”), and also “a soul surgeon.”5 But where is liberty in that magisterial construction? In society-as-it-is, it seems there are only three possibilities. One may be a wise and farsighted manipulator, a dispassionate puppeteer who tries to

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make those who depend on him happy, rather than free. But how many of those can there be? One may try to protect one’s inner freedom from social burdens and injustices – as does Emile in chains – and give up ambitions and dreams for contentment and acceptance of one’s place in the social order, as do the members of Wolmar’s “commune.” Neither of those two lifeworlds, to borrow a term from Habermas, seems to have really appealed to Rousseau – although he likes playing God on paper (and, for that, posterity can be grateful to him). Contented submission was certainly not his thing. There is a third possibility, suggested by Albert Hirschman’s book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970): after voice (i.e., books), a certain form of loyalty (or conformity) that he could not, deep down, accept, there remains exit. Let us face it: in society (I would say, in any society – even in that of the Social Contract or the small communities that are governed more or less along Rousseauian lines – which demands a subordination of the private to the public that can all too easily mean either a gradual shrinking of the public sphere, or a disappearance of the private one in emergencies), l’enfer, c’est les autres. Reading the Confessions, the letters to other celebrities, and the Dialogues, one cannot avoid the conclusion that life in society meant, for Jean-Jacques, either the torments of dependence on one’s loves, friends, and enemies, or the harassing and ever-renewed battle against public opinion, the need to set the record straight, a life of friendships that end in accusations of falsely or even accurately suspected plots, of battles for reputation, understanding, and posterity. What is left, then, is internal exile: what Rousseau tells us in the Reveries. If not a vagabond, at least the genius as promeneur solitaire, as outsider – as close to l’ homme de la nature of the Second Discourse as centuries and centuries of socialization allow. Ultimately, to borrow a title from Raymond Polin, Rousseau’s last word is la politique de la solitude: the chosen freedom of the outcast. No t e s 1 J. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1969). 2 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 362. Author’s translation here and throughout. 3 Emile, OC, vol. iv, p. 651. 4 Emile et Sophie, OC, vol. iv, p. 917. 5 Shklar, Men and Citizens, p. 136.

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Index

Adorno, Theodore 204 D’Agoty, Jacques Gautier 32 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’ 64, 77–90, 95, 101, 102 Algeria 169 Amsterdam 60, 257 Annecy 234, 282 Arendt, Hannah 92, 94, 252, 254 Aristotle 9, 11, 30, 85–6, 100 Politics 9, 11 Augustine 114, 233, 276 Baker, Felicity 34–5 Barguillet, Françoise 237 Bayle, Pierre 47, 275 Beaumont, Christophe de 14–16 Beckett, Samuel 286 Benjamin, Walter 201, 204 Berlin, Isaiah 2, 162, 217, 232, 270–1, 276, 277 Bernard, (Uncle) 177 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri 238, 240, 260 Bersani, Leo 264 Bloom, Alan 51 Boas, George 45–7 Bonaparte, Napoleon 193–4, 197 Bonnet, Charles 30–1 Boothby, Brooke 267 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 77, 83 Boswell, James 233 Bourdin, Jean-Claude 69 Brutus 220 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 28–31, 32, 67, 70 Burgelin, Pierre 259–60 Camus, Albert 125 Cassirer, Ernst 32–3 Castillon, Jean 45 Cato 49, 220 Cazotte, Jacques 65

Chambéry 17 Les Charmettes 196, 199 Chenonceaux 61 Chevallier, Jean-Jacques 113 Choiseul, Etienne-François, Duc de 236 Chrysippus 49 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 49 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de 28, 32, 64, 267 Constant, Benjamin 2 Conti, Prince de 235–6 Corancez, Guillaume-Olivier 242 Corneille, Pierre 88 Cranston, Maurice 231 Crébillon, Claude-Prosper Jolyot de 87–8 Damiens, Robert-François 236 Damrosch, Leo 278 Dancourt, Florent-Carton, sieur d’Ancourt, known as 79 Darwin, Charles 71 Daston, Lorraine 29–30 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe 165 Deleuze, Gilles 253, 267 De Man, Paul 152 Dent, Nicholas 51–2 Derrida, Jacques 35, 36, 89 Descartes, René 29, 216, 222 Desprez de Boissy, Charles 83 Diderot, Denis 30, 45, 58, 79, 96, 114, 116, 118, 194, 197, 233, 236, 238, 276, 284 Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron 66 Fils naturel 69 Jacques le fataliste 231 Neveu de Rameau 65 Paradoxe sur le comédien 67, 96 Pensées philosophiques 69 Pensées sur l’ interprétation de la nature 30 Salon of 1767 65 Religieuse 65 Rêve de d’Alembert 233

309

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Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, Abbé 96 Dudding 235 Du Deffand, Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise 257 Dumarsais, César Chesneau 27, 36 Traité des tropes 27 Durkheim, Emile 35, 120, 123 Egypt 193, 281 Ehrard, Jean 222, 223 Eigeldinger, Frédéric 260 Eigeldinger, Marc 232 Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers 30, 59, 60, 66, 117, 250, 285 “Arithmétique politique” 62–3, 69, 71 “Autorité politique” 63 “Critique” 275–6 “Discours Préliminaire” 10 “Droit naturel” 69–70, 71 “Genève” 78–81, 95 “Musique” 98–9 “Oeconomie politique” 68, 69, 117, 119 “Ruine” 201, 206 Engels, Friedrich 263 England 60, 235, 236 Epictetus 262 Epicurus 47 Epinay, Louise Tardieu d’Esclavelles, dame de La Live d’ 236, 238 Ermenonville 193 Euripides 103 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe 161, 165–8 Flaubert, Gustave 201 Fontainebleau 201 Force, Pierre 47–9 Foucault, Michel 29–30, 249, 278 Histoire de la folie à l’ âge classique 278 Mots et les choses 29–30 Surveiller et punir 278 Franklin, Benjamin 239 Frederick the Great 236 Freud, Sigmund 235, 264–5, 270 Gallison, Peter 29–30 Gassendi, Pierre 47 Gauthier, Théophile 32 Geneva 14–15, 77–90, 144, 174, 180–1, 232 Girardin, René-Louis, Marquis de 193 Gourevitch, Victor 10 Green, Thomas Hill 137 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, Baron 65, 66, 78, 79, 236, 238

Groethuysen, Bernhard 119, 130 Grotius, Hugo 24, 116 Habermas, Jürgen 294 Harari, Josué 164 Harvey, Irene E. 159 Havens, George R. 62 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 120, 122, 133 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien 123, 261, 263 Herodotus 103 Hirschman, Albert 294 Hitler, Adolf 201 Hobbes, Thomas 12–13, 15, 18, 24, 26, 47, 52, 115, 136, 182, 183, 233 Leviathan 12, 127 On the Citizen 12 Hoffmann, Paul 233 Hoffmann, Stanley 275 Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’ 233 Holland 15, 60, 61, 63 Homer 103, 166 Odyssey 166–7 Houdetot, Sophie d’ 279, 285 Huet, Marie-Hélène 170 Hulliung, Mark 275 Hume, David 28, 48, 233, 235, 236, 238 Huxley, Aldous 125, 127 Israel, Jonathan 45 Johnson, Samuel 233 Jouvenel, Bertrand de 125, 137 Kafka, Franz 129 Kant, Immanuel 52, 92, 119, 123–4, 133, 135, 137, 221, 267–8, 270, 271 Kavanagh, Thomas 169, 259 Keith, Maréchal 236 Kelly, Christopher 9, 10 Kolbe, Peter 32 Description du Cap de Bonne Espérance 32 Koselleck, Reinhardt 275, 276 Lafond, Jean 47 Lambercier, Mademoiselle 177, 199–200 Lanson, Gustave 125–6 La Placette, Jean 14 Larkin, Philip 238 Larnage, Madame de 195–200, 235 La Rochefoucauld, François, Duc de 47, 182 Lausanne 234, 286 Leigh, R. A. 238 Levasseur, Thérèse 176–7, 238 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 35, 36 Lévinas, Emmanuel 278

I n de x Linnaeus, Carl 30, 32 Lisbon 195, 202–4 Livy 175 Locke, John 24, 26, 94, 115–17, 132, 182, 217 Louis xiv, king of France 194, 201 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 45–7 Lovelace, Richard 243 Lucretius 45–7 Lycurgus 179 Lyon 235 Lyons, John 84 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de Dialogues de Phocion 265 Machiavelli, Niccolò 17, 175, 181, 283 Makarius, Michael 203 Malebranche, Nicolas de 47 Malesherbes, Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de 184 Mandeville, Bernard de 45, 47–9 Marmontel, Jean-François 30, 79, 275–6 Marx, Karl 133, 217, 233 Marsilius of Padua 114 Masson, Pierre-Maurice 151 May, Georges 208 Melon, Jean-François 61–2 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 194, 197 Michelet, Jules 121 Mill, John Stuart 232 Miller, Christopher L. 280 Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti, marquis de 132 Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known as 85 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de 35, 61, 114, 115, 117, 128, 132, 134, 180 Lettres persanes 212 Montpellier 195 Mussolini, Benito 201 Naples 259 Neuchâtel 236 Neuhouser, Frederick 51, 53 Nichols, James H., Jr. 45 Nicole, Pierre 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich 49, 53, 267–8 Nîmes 195, 196, 200–2 North America 208 O’Gorman, Donal 65 O’Hagan, Timothy 33, 51 Orwell, George 127 Paris 59, 65, 169, 238, 257, 283 Pascal, Blaise 44, 93

311

Petty, William Several Essays in Political Arithmetic 59, 61–3 Plato 11, 77, 93, 103, 114, 115, 119, 127, 176, 186, 226, 281 Republic 11, 269 Polin, Raymond 294 Pont du Gard 195–202, 204 Prévost, Pierre 260 Prévost d’Exiles, Antoine-François Histoire générale des voyages 32, 208–9 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 124 Proust, Marcel 281 Quintilian 36, 280 Racine, Jean 88 Rameau, Jean-François 65 Rameau, Jean-Philippe 59, 65, 280 Rawls, John 51, 52 Raymond, Marcel 283 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François, Abbé 24 Histoire des deux Indes 24 Rey, Marc-Michel 11, 79, 266 Robert, Hubert 193, 194, 197, 200, 201 Robertson, John 47 Robespierre, Maximilien-Marie-Isidore de 133 Robinson, Marilynne 144 Rodger, Nicholas 60 Rolland, Romain 264 Rome 179, 200, 257 Ronell, Avital 264 Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste 265 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Confessions 10, 18, 59, 66, 67, 68, 93, 174, 177–8, 195–200, 204, 224–6, 231, 234–5, 238, 240, 242, 246, 248, 251, 253–4, 257, 265, 266, 276, 278, 279, 282–4, 285, 294 Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne 122, 135–6, 245 Contrat social 2, 3, 17–18, 26, 54, 69, 95, 102, 113–38, 143, 151, 160, 161, 182–3, 198–9, 213–14, 231, 232, 236, 245, 257, 259, 261, 274, 275, 278, 280, 283, 286, 292, 293, 294 Devin du village 282, 286 Dialogues: Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques 93, 95, 178, 183, 231, 236, 245–7, 248–9, 251–2, 253, 265, 266–7, 277–8, 279, 282, 286, 294 Dictionnaire de musique 97, 98–9, 280–2, 283, 284 Discours sur les sciences et les arts 11, 45, 61–3, 64, 69, 93, 95, 135, 179–80, 183, 186, 235, 279, 292

312

I n de x

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (cont.) Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’ inégalité parmi les hommes 1, 9–18, 24–6, 58, 61, 62, 67, 68, 70, 71, 95, 122, 135, 180–2, 183, 195, 202, 218, 226, 253, 262, 263, 275, 284, 292, 294 Dissertation sur la musique moderne 280 Emile, ou de l’ éducation 14–17, 45, 50, 52, 53, 128, 135, 144, 147, 159–71, 176, 186–8, 207, 208, 209–14, 231–2, 236, 237, 257, 265, 276, 278, 286, 292–3 Emile et Sophie, ou les solitaires 161, 168–70, 241, 257, 258–71, 292–3 Essai sur l’origine des langues 71, 94–5, 98–100, 101, 280 First Discourse see Discours sur les sciences et les arts Fragments sur Dieu et sur la révélation 93 Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse 3, 65, 92, 93, 176, 178, 195, 209–14, 218–24, 257, 276, 278, 279, 285, 286, 293 Lettre à d’Alembert 66, 77–90, 95, 97, 100 Lettre à Voltaire sur la providence 202–3 Lettres morales 279 Lettre sur la musique française 280 Persifleur 64–8 Préface de Narcisse 96 Profession de foi du Vicaire savoyardis 135–6, 143, 146–7, 150, 152–3, 233, 266 Rêveries du promeneur solitaire 185, 224–5, 231, 237–8, 241–2, 245, 247–50, 252–3, 261, 263–4, 265, 266, 267, 268–70, 271, 274, 279, 285, 286, 294 Second Discourse see Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’ inégalité parmi les hommes Roussel, Jean 211 Saint-Germain 18 St. Paul 13 Saint-Pierre, Île de 176, 240 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de 182

Seneca 45 Shklar, Judith 52, 292, 293 Smith, Adam 28, 45, 47–9, 239 Spinoza, Baruch 114, 116 Sraffa, Piero 59, 60 Starobinski, Jean 171, 234–5, 237, 240, 263, 279, 283, 285 Steiner, Uwe 203 Stewart, Dugald 28 Strong, Tracy B. 281 Suarez, Francesco 114 Switzerland 235, 236 Talmon, Jacob Leib 124 Tertullian 77, 83 Thoreau, Henry David 96 Toqueville, Alexis de 127 Touchefeu, Yves 151–2 Treytorens, Monsieur de 283 Trye 236 Tuck, Richard 47 Turin 234 Venture de Villeneuve 234, 282 Vernes 78–9 Versailles 194 Vincennes 61, 147–8, 181, 235, 284 Vitoria, Francisco di 114 Volney, Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, comte de 194 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, known as 59, 87, 95, 202–3, 236 Mahomet 87 Wagner, Richard 100 Warens, Madame de 178, 195, 251, 282 Weil, Eric 174 Wintzenried 251 Wokler, Robert 10, 14, 33–4 Xenocrates 176

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