Rousseau and Revolution

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Rousseau and Revolution

Continuum Studies in Political Philosophy Continuum Studies in Political Philosophy presents cutting-edge scholarship in the field of political philosophy. Making available the latest high-quality research from an international range of scholars working on key topics and controversies in political philosophy and political science, this series is an important and stimulating resource for students and academics working in the area. Also available from Continuum: The Concept of Justice – Thomas Patrick Burke Nozick’s Libertarian Project – Mark D. Friedman Morality, Leadership and Public Policy – Eric Thomas Weber Rawls, Dewey, and Constructivism – Eric Thomas Weber Forthcoming: The Limits of Reason in Hobbes’s Commonwealth – Michael P. Krom Perfecting Justice in Rawls, Habermas and Honneth – Miriam Bankovsky Ricoeur, Rawls and Capability Justice – Molly Harikat Mann


Edited by

Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mikkel Thorup

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 © Holger Ross Lauritsen, Mikkel Thorup and Contributors, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

978-1-4411-2897-3 (HB)

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Rousseau and revolution / edited by Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mikkel Thorup. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-2897-3 1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778--Political and social views. 2. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778--Criticism and interpretation. 3. Revolutions--Philosophy. 4. Political science--Philosophy. 5. Democracy--Philosophy. I. Lauritsen, Holger Ross. II. Thorup, Mikkel. III. Title. JC179.R9R683 2011 321.09’4--dc22

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

2010051887

Contents

vii

Acknowledgements Introduction Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mikkel Thorup

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Part 1: Democracy and Violence Chapter 1:

Chapter 2:

Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions: Rousseau’s Paradoxical Conservatism Blaise Bachofen The General Will and National Consciousness: Radical Requirements of Democratic Legitimacy in the Writing of Rousseau and Fanon Jane Anna Gordon

Chapter 3:

Rousseau and the Terror: A Reassessment Julian Bourg

Chapter 4:

Arbitrariness and Freedom: Hegel on Rousseau and Revolution Angelica Nuzzo

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31 51

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Part 2: Philosophy and Political Change Chapter 5:

Reverse Revolution: The Paradox of Rousseau’s Authorship Fayçal Falaky

Chapter 6:

The General Will between Conservation and Revolution Holger Ross Lauritsen

Chapter 7:

Rousseau and Revolution in the Making of a Modern Political Culture: Denmark 1750–1850 Bertel Nygaard

83 98

114

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Contents Part 3: Revolution and History

Chapter 8:

Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order Christiane Mossin

Chapter 9:

Rousseau and the Revolutions of the Earth: Remarks on a Natural Metaphor Antoine Hatzenberger

Chapter 10: The Revolutionary Return of the Orator: Public Space and the Spoken Word in the Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Masano Yamashita

133

152

161

Chapter 11: Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic James Swenson

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgements

This book grew out of the presentations and engaged discussions at the conference ‘Rousseau and Revolution’ that the editors hosted at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, in March 13–15, 2009. We are very grateful for the scholarly and warm atmosphere at the conference, an atmosphere hopefully reflected in the articles. From the conference several presentations were selected and others were solicited from outside. We would like to thank all the participants at the conference, presenters and others, for their contributions as well as the authors in this book for entrusting two distant Northerners to collect and publish their articles. We would also like to thank Thorbjørn Friis and Eva Jørgensen for all their help setting everything up and ensuring the free flow of coffee, food and lively discussions. Thanks are also due to the Institute of Philosophy and the History of Ideas as well as the Danish Research School for Philosophy, the History of Ideas and the History of Science as well as the Research Focus Globalization at the University of Aarhus for providing the necessary funds for the conference. Finally we would like to thank Continuum for a positive engagement with this book from when it was not more than an email with a title until its final materialization as a book. Aarhus, September 2010 Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mikkel Thorup

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Introduction Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mikkel Thorup

The study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political philosophy is a privileged way of discussing a large number of topics which are highly relevant today, both for political scholars and for a larger audience. Posing the specific question of the relationship between Rousseau’s writings and the concept and event of political revolution has appeared to be a way of uniting a number of very different explorations and questions under one single heading. Consequently, we might say that the purpose here is not to find out what Rousseau actually meant about revolution. Or rather, the purpose is not merely to find this out. In fact, some of the articles collected in the present volume contain detailed and convincing attempts to understand Rousseau’s political philosophy on its own conditions and in its own context, while others explore what Rousseau’s reflections on revolution may offer us in our present political and social condition. Why, then, is Rousseau relevant today, and why is the concept of (political) revolution? As to the latter question, an answer is that the phenomenon of radical political change, including mass movements, is always a burning political topic, whether one endorses such events or not, just witness the events in Iran after the 2009 presidential elections. In fact, revolutions simply seem to happen from time to time. As Gilles Deleuze puts it, according to Antoine Hatzenberger, ‘people become revolutionary. Fortunately, historians won’t prevent that’ (Hatzenberger, Chapter 9). Now, while agreeing with Deleuze and Hatzenberger on the inevitability and recurrent character of revolutions, one might of course disagree with Deleuze’s use of the word ‘fortunately’. At least, one might claim that revolutions are only ‘fortunate’ in so far as they bring about progress in equality, general prosperity and, not least, democracy. Still, revolutions, good or bad, seem here to stay. The important question is thus: What is a good or a democratic revolution? Or one might even ask: Can revolutions bring about any kind of democracy? On a more general level, the question which, from the eighteenth century’s invention of modern mass democracy until today, has been central to political thinking is: What is the relationship between (mass) democracy and (political) violence? This book argues that no single theoretician is of

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bigger relevance to a discussion of this question than Rousseau. Not just because of the radically democratic content of his writings but also because of the immense and complex influence these writings have had on the French Revolution as well as on other revolutions and revolutionary movements around the world. ‘Whereas Montesquieu reserved power for the aristocracy and Voltaire for the upper middle class, Rousseau gave the vote to the poor and political power to all the people’ (Soboul, 1975, 70), the French Marxist historian Albert Soboul claimed in his influential work on the French revolution. In fact, Rousseau might arguably be seen as the democrat not only in the Enlightenment, but in the history of Western political thought. No one before and hardly any one after Rousseau have made institutional propositions that were as democratic as those of Rousseau or have insisted on the radical theoretical and practical implications of democracy as intensely as him. Every contradiction, every implication is taken to its extreme end point. His criticism of political representation (Rousseau, 1997e, Book III, chapter 1) and his conception of the relationship between the ‘sovereign’ and the government, that is, between the legislative and the executive power (Rousseau, 1997e, Book II, chapter 2 and Book III, chapter 1), are still today central issues in institutional and constitutional debates. As to the latter idea, modern democracies are still divided between those in which the executive power and the legislative power, in the words of Montesquieu, balance each other (for instance the USA and several South-American countries) and those in which the executive power is subordinated to, that is, appointed by and responsible before, the legislative power (for instance, the Scandinavian countries). As to the critique of representation, no modern democracy has followed Rousseau’s demand that the entire people be directly involved in the lawmaking process. Indeed, it could easily be argued that this idea is practically impossible, and that Rousseau even seems to admit this when, in his proposition for a reform of the government of Poland, he accepts a kind of political representation (Rousseau, 1997a, 200–1) or when he in the Social Contract applies climatology, demography and geography to argue for the practical irrelevance of democracy for all societies larger than a city state. Rousseau’s merit, however, is that he has shown, in the most emphatic way, some of the problems that political representation entails, at a moment in history where democracy and representative democracy began to become synonyms (Manin, 1997, 79–93). Ever since, Rousseau has played the role of reminding the modern world that representative democracy is not the essence or single truth of democracy, but rather a practical and contingent

Introduction

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attempt to fulfil the fundamental democratic demand that the ‘people’ rules while simultaneously making the system workable. His work serves as a revelatory exercise in the ever imperfect or even hypocritical manifestations of democracy in the actually existing democracies and it reminds us that violence is not always the limit or contradiction of democracy but can, in specific historical moments, be its precondition, ranging from mass democratic movements like the green movement in Iran to the ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, as then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said about the 2006 Israel–Lebanon war (inadvertently repeating Marx’s famous claim: ‘[T]here is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror’ (Marx, 1848)). The radicalism and honesty of Rousseau’s work forces us to confront tough questions where political preconceptions fail to fill up the crack that a serious engagement with his works opens. This book is divided into three thematic sections: (1) Democracy and Violence, (2) Philosophy and Political Change and (3) Revolution and History.

Democracy and Violence Given this central role of Rousseau’s political philosophy in the development of and the discussion about democracy, inquiries into his conception of and relation to revolution is also an inquiry into the relationship between Western democracy and violence. Indeed, in philosophical theories of democracy, the conception of this relationship is often linked to a specific understanding of Rousseau’s political philosophy. From an overall perspective, we might group the positions in this debate in three different classes: First, there is the idea that (too much) democracy entails violence. This violence is carried out either by the ‘masses’ or the ‘people’ itself in revolutionary acts or by a sovereign government representing the sovereign people without being limited in any way. It can be argued that both kinds of violence were a part of the French Revolution. Now, in such conceptions of democracy and violence, it seems that Rousseau’s political philosophy can be conceived of in two different ways. On the one hand, some claim that, due to his ultra-democratic position, Rousseau had to endorse violence, as for instance when he in his discussion of majority rule ends up by claiming that those who do not agree with the majority must be ‘forced to

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be free’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 7). As Angelica Nuzzo points out in Chapter 4, a subtle variant of this critique is developed by Hegel in his Philosophy of Right, where he argues that the Terror was a consequence of Rousseau’s idea that individuals’ egoistic and arbitrary wills can be completely suppressed by an abstract concern for the common good. On the other hand, others, for instance Julian Bourg in Chapter 3, insist that Rousseau was in fact aware of the alleged dangers inherent in ‘excessive’ democracy, and that he warns against both revolutionary outbursts of popular violence and, especially, the situation where the executive power, the prince, presents himself as incarnating sovereignty and, in the name of the people, installs a despotic regime. Secondly, there is the idea that democracy is dependent on an initial revolutionary violence. This violence, however, should be endorsed as the alternative to a worse but mostly hidden or overseen violence, that is, tyranny and repression. This argument has been adduced by radical thinkers from Robespierre to Lenin. Most recently, Slavoj Žižek has repeated it in a distinction between ‘subjective’ violence, that is, crime, terror and revolution, and ‘objective’ violence, that is, either the ‘symbolic’ violence ‘embodied in language’ or the ‘systemic’ violence resulting from ‘the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems’ (Žižek, 2008, 1). As to Rousseau’s position in this debate, it seems once again that there are two prevalent readings. On the one hand, some claim that Rousseau’s arguments are very much like those of Robespierre, Lenin and Žižek, and that ‘the act by which a people is a people’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 5) is an act of beneficent popular violence. With Rousseau’s words, ‘the popular insurrection that ends in the death or deposition of a Sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and fortunes of his subjects. As he was maintained by force alone, it is force alone that overthrows him. Thus everything takes place according to the natural order’ (Rousseau, 1997b, 191). On the other hand, others claim that Rousseau did not fully grasp the radical consequences of his own democratic theory. Thus, Jane Anna Gordon claims that ‘Rousseau oscillates between radical irreverence and cold feet’ (Gordon, Chapter 2) and that the necessary concrete implications of Rousseau’s intuitions about the violent character of the establishment of national self-determination were only understood by later radical political theorists such as Frantz Fanon. The third conception of the relationship between violence and democracy might be the most widespread. It is the idea that democracy is basically the opposite of violence, the latter being a fundamental feature of despotic regimes only. Or one might say that real democracy is non- or anti-violence. Again

Introduction

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we find two versions of this applied to Rousseau. The first position portrays Rousseau as anti-democratic, perhaps even totalitarian, and his political project, especially the notion of the general will, opens up for or legitimizes violent despotic rule. This is the conservative, Burkean reading of Rousseau by, for instance, Jacob Talmon in his 1952 book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. In the other position, Rousseau, according to Blaise Bachofen, represents a certain republican conception of democracy which, in opposition to the liberal tradition, especially Locke, is sceptical of violent popular uprisings and revolutions. More specifically, Bachofen claims that Rousseau’s republican conception of democracy is more concerned about ‘the moral precondition for freedom’, that is, a long and difficult education of the people by which a sum of particular wills is converted into a general will, than about the act of liberation from tyranny. ‘The free people is not – or is not only – a people who frees itself from subjugation by a violent act. The free people is the one who is morally capable of freedom, who is educated towards freedom.’ (Bachofen, Chapter 1). Whether one or another of these many readings of Rousseau is the right one should not be determined here. From the point of view of intellectual history, however, Bachofen’s interpretation is interesting in so far as it – partly inspired by another French scholar in political philosophy, JeanFabien Spitz (1995, 341–465) – explicitly links Rousseau to the so-called republican tradition in Western political thought (Bachofen, 2002, 15). This tradition has had a revival in the last decades and is represented by neo-republican scholars such as J. G. A. Pocock (1975), Quentin Skinner (1999), Phillip Pettit (1997) and Maurizio Viroli (2002). In this mainly anglophone tradition, however, Rousseau has most often been either forgotten or considered as identical with some kind of tyrannical populist majoritarianism (‘Rousseau is probably responsible for having given currency to [ . . . ] a populist view’, (Pettit, 1997, 30)) opposed to the balanced spirit of true republicanism. On the other hand, by showing how Rousseau does in fact belong to the republican tradition, Bachofen seems to makes a double move. On the one hand, Rousseau’s democratic theory is made republican (that is, republican in the moderate sense given to this word by Pocock, Skinner, Pettit, Viroli, etc.) and is thus being differentiated from other conceptions of democracy put forward by socialists, radicals and revolutionaries who traditionally claim to have Rousseau on their side. On the other hand, the republican tradition is made more democratic than it is when presented by the mentioned neo-republicans who most often do not, as Rousseau, regard popular sovereignty as a condition of the legitimacy of any political society.

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Needless to say, Bachofen’s motivation for making both these moves is not merely of historical interest but also of concern for contemporary politics. Even though it might not be polite to interpret one of the contributors to this anthology (doing to him what he does himself to Rousseau), it might be claimed that Bachofen urges us to find a middle course between two tendencies in modern French politics and especially intellectual life, that is, on the one hand, a Sarkozist liberalist conservatism, and, on the other hand, different Marxist or anarchist traditions. In the search for such a third position, it is obviously an advantage to have Rousseau on your side. In this whole enumeration of different conceptions of Rousseau’s relation to democracy and violence, a very recent interpretation of Rousseau should be mentioned, namely, the one briefly sketched out by Jonathan Israel in his Radical Enlightenment. Similarly to Bachofen and Spitz, Israel claims that Rousseau’s place in a specific republican tradition has been overlooked, and that he does thus not belong to a Lockean tradition of natural right. However, the republicanism referred to by Israel is not the one referred to by Bachofen and Spitz, that is, the Pocockian ‘classical’ or ‘Atlantic’ republicanism, but instead a ‘democratic republicanism’ inspired by Spinoza, the so-called radical Enlightenment that, together with materialism and anticlericalism, propagated radically egalitarian ideas. Thus, according to Israel, Rousseau did not really, as in Bachofen’s and Spitz’s view, render a tradition more democratic than it was, but rather inferred his radically democratic views from ideas already inherent to the radical strain of the Enlightenment, ideas to which, moreover, he was also sometimes opposed: Any proper appreciation of Rousseau’s role and greatness has to concede that his thought springs from a long, and almost obsessive dialogue with the radical ideas of the past – in many cases as filtered through the mind of his former comrade Diderot (Israel, 2002, 718). And then, just adding to the complexity of both Rousseau himself and his reception, Israel, in a later work, describes how ‘Rousseau’s political goals all tended to an agenda that the radical philosophes [ . . . ] in varying degrees deplored and consciously strove to avoid’ (Israel, 2010, 63–4), not least his alleged preference for direct democracy.

Philosophy and Political Change The question of philosophy’s part in social or political change is a controversial and contested debate. Philosophers, historians and social scientists debate the interrelationship between ideas, structures and societael

Introduction

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change – and everyone eagerly assigns praise and blame to various thinkers for this or that development. Rousseau has been the epicentre for this kind of debate for more than 200 years, centred round, albeit not exclusively, the French Revolution as the most monumental social and political change in modern history. Was Rousseau its ‘author’ or did he just become the convenient target of attack for anti-radicals then and since? The relations between Rousseau and the question and organization of political change is a privileged place to investigate the much broader question of what role philosophy can have and should have in generating alternatives. To answer what role Rousseau played is also to start answering what role philosophy in general can have. During the French revolution Rousseau was alleged by both some of its protagonists and its opponents to be its ‘author’ (as Louis-Sébastien Mercier claims, cf. Swenson, 2000, ix). Hardly any philosopher has ever experienced such an adoration as did Rousseau during the French Revolution. Obviously, it can be discussed whether this was a real influence, or if the revolutionaries did (on purpose?) misunderstand Rousseau and used him for what they wanted in order to have either a saint or a political guarantee/ reference. The name of Rousseau became one of the ways to mark out political positions and oppositions. Rousseau reduced to a name, a reference disconnected from its person and work, is the destiny, one could say, of many whose name becomes a shorthand for a particular position and this then becomes what people ‘know’ about the bearer of the name. This is wonderfully illustrated by Fayçal Falaky in his article on Rousseau as the saviour of people who never read him but who knew, or thought they knew, of him (Falaky, Chapter 5). His name ‘had become commonplace, but so was the risk of his misinterpretation’ (ibid.). Falaky shows how Rousseau was linked to the events of the French Revolution in an attempt to ‘anchor their ideological beliefs on a philosophical foundation’ (ibid.) that they may or may not have read. The article also shows that this may not have been an innocent move because it, according to Falaky, ‘marked a setback for science and rational empiricism and meant a sudden return to religious and essentialist a priori tropes’ (ibid.). Falaky shows how we must complicate the question of authorship because it may more properly be the spirit or aura of Rousseau rather than his writings per se that was used to sanctify the event. If we take the view that the revolutionaries misused or deformed Rousseau’s actual political thought, one might also ask why it was Rousseau that the revolutionaries chose to misuse. In other words: Is there anything inherent in Rousseau’s philosophy and concepts which makes them fit for different and

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changing uses? To take another example, one might claim that one of the advantages of religious texts such as the Bible is that they are so ambivalent that they can be used for a lot of different religious and political purposes. In the same way, Lauritsen claims that Rousseau’s concept of the general will has an inherent ambiguity which makes it fit for conceptualizing the different and contradictory developments that insurrectional and revolutionary movements often go through (Lauritsen, Chapter 6). The complexity of Rousseau’s work can either be dismissed as incoherence or one can, as Lauritsen both does and shows others do, be pushed into different directions, or perhaps one should rather say that his theory opens up for various practical resolutions of the paradoxes, contradictions and imperfections that his theory reveals in our basic political and social patterns. The open-ended interpretative possibilities or the ways in which his work is eminently open for politicizisation is also demonstrated by Bertel Nygaard in his article on the Danish reception and characterization of Rousseau between 1750 and 1850 (Nygaard, Chapter 7). Nygaard shows how Rousseau was in a sense an empty space, even in a peripheral part of Europe at the time, in which to project ideas and positions in the public debate. The name and categorization of ‘Rousseau’ then becomes for the historian a way to understand the articulation and emergence of a political culture and language in the period. Nygaard shows how the French Revolution in a sense radicalized and politicized the reading of Rousseau, making it per tinent for subsequent readings to deal with the question of his authorship of the revolution – ‘whether by idolizing Rousseau as the philosophical hero of revolution or, less publicly, by condemning him as a rabble-rousing scoundrel’ (ibid.) – but also how the position on the revolution coloured the reading of Rousseau himself. Most if not all of the articles in this book as well as the positive and negative evaluations of Rousseau’s ‘part’ in the French and subsequent revolutions take it as evident that ideas matter, that philosophy matters. There is no innocence in thought. Theory has or can be made to have practical consequences. A purely materialist reading of revolutions or social change is hard to come by, especially today. We may debate the relevance of ideas and philosophy compared to other factors; we may haggle over who deserves blame or praise, but almost everyone would agree that it matters what we think, who and how we read. And, again, this is most emphatically true when it comes to Rousseau who himself placed great importance in ideas (perhaps mainly to destroy established and cherished mores) and to the evaluation of Rousseau. Larger readings of him must answer the question of authorship. Just as the French Revolution became one of the constitutive dividing lines of political ideologies in Europe, so did the reading and

Introduction

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interpretation of Rousseau. Just about any anti-revolutionary or conservative thinker will tend to repeat Edmund Burke’s claim that the revolution and the Terror was the legitimate and necessary child of Rousseau whereas the positive readings of the revolution and/or Rousseau have either affirmed or denied the authorship, making the latter, one could argue, the more interesting interpretation because it has something to investigate and debate, not just something to proof and criticize. It could be argued that only a paradoxical political philosophy can have such a central and thorough-going role in a political revolution as had Rousseau’s philosophy in the French revolution, given that, as Swenson puts it, ‘a radical transformation of ideas, the revolution needed to negate its own origins even as it constructed its legitimacy on their basis’ (Swenson, 2000, 16). It should be added that a long tradition in the reception of Rousseau, going from Ernst Cassirer to Robert Derathé and finally Blaise Bachofen, rejects this paradoxality and emphasizes the coherence of Rousseau’s philosophy (with Bachofen’s words (Bachofen, 2002, 19), Rousseau’s coherence is a ‘systematism without system’1). On the other hand, this very connection is a topic in the history of Western political thought, and that in a highly polemical way. As Bourg points out in the beginning of his article, the struggle about Rousseau’s influence has been a part of the cold war. To put it in other words (in order to resume): Robert Derathé, in the avertissement to Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (JeanJacques Rousseau and the political science of his times) mentions ‘this treatise [The Social Contract] which hitherto has caused more polemics than patient investigations’ (Derathé, 1988, 2). Now, what one might do is to make a ‘patiente recherche’ about the ‘polémique’. This ‘polémique’, however, is of double kind. On the one hand, there is the ‘polémique’ about Rousseau’s ideas, that is, a polemic about whether Rousseau was right or wrong, but in which the positions changed, according as Rousseau was considered to be liberal, socialist or something else. Nygaard shows in his article how this discussion was developed in Denmark in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, there is the ‘polémique’ about Rousseau’s influence, a polemic displayed between liberals, conservatives and socialists mainly in the twentieth century.

Revolution and History The word revolution in its political context used to refer to the revolving cycle of regime types but in the decades surrounding the French Revolution – and accelerating within the revolution – it came increasingly to mean not the

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eternal and inevitable return of old but the creation ex nihilo of the new (Koselleck, 2006, 240–51). Experience gave way to expectation as the guiding principle of politics, revolution and history (and progress among others) emerged as the concepts we recognize them to be today: concepts tied to expectations and projections of the future. The period of Rousseau was one of impending change. Robespierre stated: ‘The theory of revolutionary government is as new as the revolution which brought it into being. It should not be sought in the books of political writers, who did not foresee that revolution’ (Robespierre, 2007, 99). Still, it does seem fair to say that most seemed to sense the old world, the old regime, crumble without being fully able to determine the new. One might, like Bachofen, claim that Rousseau mistrusted revolutions (Bachofen, Chapter 1). However, one cannot say that he was indifferent to revolutions. On the other hand, the topic of revolution plays a central role in his philosophy, even though this philosophy was developed before the age that is normally called the Age of Revolution, and in which modern democracy developed through a series of democratic revolutions. This is without doubt one of the main reasons why his philosophy became so influential in the following two and half centuries. When the past is losing its legitimatory potential and the future is invested with longings and utopias, the question of political action, of creation, destruction, revolution and of order take first place. This is the theme in Christiane Mossin’s article dealing with radical institutional creation and constitutionalization within Rousseau’s thought (Mossin, Chapter 8). Mossin shows how Rousseau revealed ‘the limitations of political intentionality by pointing to the powerful as well as the impotent aspects of laws and institutions in terms of their ability to direct and control social dynamics’. This makes it possible for Mossin to conclude that Rousseau operates with a complex perspective ‘between order and disorder, consisting either in a legal order undermined by conflicting customs or in a cultural order where laws have crumbled.’ Every order has change written in its constitutional structure, and every societal change has institutions and orders presupposed and working within its movements. Questions of continuity and discontinuity press themselves upon the agenda once the societal forces seem uncontainable within the order that be. Will it be a gradual change maintaining the contours of the existing order, or will it make a clear break and discard all standing structures? The articles in this book take different approaches to Rousseau’s view on this. A revolution may seem like a hurricane or flood to the participants and spectators: An unleashing of uncontrollable forces difficult, if not impossible

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to predict. Antoine Hatzenberger draws out interesting parallels between natural disasters and political revolutions and looks at various aspects of Rousseau’s analysis of the idea of revolution (Hatzenberger, Chapter 9). He states that Rousseau ‘could only guess at the revolutions to come, and although he gave no guaranty whatsoever about the precise destiny of any particular revolution – but who can? – at the very least he stated their inherent necessity’ (ibid.). Hatzenberger demonstrates how Rousseau’s concept of revolution is a mixed metaphor of both natural forces and human liberty (not unlike, though that is not Hatzenberger’s point, Machiavelli’s conceptualization of virtú and fortuna). Like the remarks on the conceptual history of revolution above, Hatzenberger shows how the previous natural philosophical connotations of ‘revolutions of the earth’ reverberate in Rousseau’s political terminology. There is no politics without language: ‘New nations could not declare independence, legislators could not promulgate laws, courts could not sentence criminals, leaders could not instruct partisans, citizens could not protest’. But this is not all: ‘Neither could we criticize, plead, promise, argue, exhort, demand, negotiate, bargain, compromise, counsel, brief, debrief, advise, or consent’ (Farr, 1988, 15). Rousseau was immensely aware of the oratorical element of politics and public life and, as Masano Yamashita shows, tied the disappearance of the classical figure of the orator to the loss of democratic practices and moral standards (Yamashita, Chapter 10). Bringing the Essay on the Origin of Languages into the collection of core texts of Rousseau’s politics, Yamashita is able to show how the question of the power of the spoken word is a key concern of Rousseau and how he laments the degeneration of the public agora into the meaningless chatter of the salon. The period conscious of its refined speech and known thereafter as the birthplace of the modern public sphere is to Rousseau a loss of democratic speech. The birth of the public sphere was to Rousseau the death of the true public speaker, and Yamashita shows how he came to this conclusion by engaging with aesthetico-political theories of language and what promises he saw for a renewed possibility of republicanism and public speech. The republic or republicanism is also the theme of our final contribution by James Swenson, and as evident in both Hatzenberger and Yamashita, he demonstrates how Rousseau uses conceptualizations now distinguished as ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, a distinction already evident in the decades after Rousseau as in Benjamin Constant’s barely camouflaged critique of Rousseau in his opposition between an ancient, republic and activist liberty and a modern, commercial, individualist liberty (Swenson, Chapter 11). Swenson discusses the revolutionary use of selected parts of Rousseau’s thinking and

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highlights the peculiarity of republicanism, Rousseau’s included, being ‘as much a way of life as a form of government’ (ibid.). This makes the political task both political-institutional and cultural-educational, and Swenson shows how reflections on political culture ‘conducive to the cultivation of the capacity of self-government’ (ibid.) permeate Rousseau’s work. Foundation of a republic is also cultivation of mores. Rousseau had a keen sense of this and it informs his study of existing societies and his recommendations to their transformation as evident in the writings on Corsica and Poland or his remarks on the resilient capacity of the Jews. In political theoretical terms this leads Rousseau, according to Swenson, to place himself between two positions often alleged in political philosophy by Constant, Isaiah Berlin and others to be mutually exclusive and hostile, namely between ‘an active, participatory liberty and a negatively defined absence of constraint on personal prioritization of choices’ (ibid.). As always, one is tempted to say, Rousseau is all his own, transcending or disturbing the distinctions and conceptions of political philosophical consensus. This makes his work challenging, sometimes confusing, but seldom boring. Rousseau thought and wrote before our present concepts and ideologies formed and one is often led to project ideas and policies back into time to make his thinking comprehensible. This makes for poor analysis and, as the contributions to this book shows, and as Swenson demonstrates in the final chapter, one can gain much more insight by suspending or critically using our present concepts and distinctions, not to name or classify Rousseau, but to show how he escaped easy labelling then and how he still refuses to fit into any neat and tight box.

Conclusion What all of the arguments, positions and conceptions above demonstrate is that political philosophy for more than 200 years has grappled, combated, celebrated, debated and used Rousseau, making him say various things, but also persistently insisting, whether in agreement or not, that it matters what Rousseau said and meant when he posed a question and suggested an answer. This makes a book about Rousseau more than just an exercise in intellectual history. It is always also a meta-reflection on the conditions of our society and thinking as well as a room in which to contemplate the possibilities and purposes of making the world anew in big and small. We hope with this book to stimulate the seemingly never-ceasing but everexpanding interest in Rousseau and to help show how the period in which

Introduction

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he lived and worked continues to reverberate and generate even today. While a scholarly engagement with Rousseau’s thinking is interesting in itself, and while there is no need to succumb to the present demand for everfaster utilization of everything for immediate and easy consumption, we do want to emphasize what all the articles show in practice: that Rousseau is a privileged point of intersection between philosophical thought and political action.

Note 1

Throughout the book, where nothing else is stated, translations are the author’s.


Part One

Democracy and Violence


Chapter 1

Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions: Rousseau’s Paradoxical Conservatism Blaise Bachofen

Introduction On the topic of Rousseau and revolution there is a long history of misunderstanding. As the commentator Jean Roussel has shown in Jean-Jacques Rousseau en France après la Révolution (Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France After the Revolution), Rousseau’s philosophy was taken over and distorted by the various factions during the revolutionary struggle.1 During Rousseau’s lifetime, Voltaire had already referred to him as ‘the little rebel’, and called him the author of an ‘Unsocial Contract’.2 Yet, on many occasions Rousseau had quite clearly stated his position on the principle of revolution. Affected in his childhood by violent uprisings in Geneva, he developed the utmost mistrust of civil unrest. In Book I of The Confessions, for example, he writes: When they took up arms in 1737, I was at Geneva, and saw the father [Barillot] and his son quit the same house armed, the one going to the townhouse, the other to his quarters, almost certain to meet face to face in the course of two hours, and prepared to give or receive death from each other. This unnatural sight made so lively an impression on me, that I solemnly vowed never to interfere in any civil war, nor assist in deciding any internal dispute by arms, either personally or by my influence. (Rousseau, 1928, 324) Later on in Book IX we read: When I heard of the attempt of a madman [he’s speaking of Damien’s attempt to kill Louis XV], when de Leyre and Madame d’Epinay spoke to me in letters of the trouble and agitation which reigned in Paris, how thankful was I to Heaven for having placed me at distance from all such

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spectacles of horror and guilt. These would have continued and increased the bilious humor which the sight of public disorders have given me. (Rousseau, 1928, 684) Finally, in Book XII, he recalls how in 1762 and 1763 some of the citizens of Geneva had invited him back in reparation for the condemnation that had followed the publication of The Social Contract and Émile. He writes: The fear of the disturbance and troubles which might be caused by my presence [at Geneva], prevented me from acquiescing to their desires, and, faithful to the oath I had formerly made, never to take the last part in any civil dissension in my country, I chose rather to let the offense remain as it was, and banish myself forever from my country, than to return to it by means which were violent and dangerous. (Rousseau, 1928, 959) In his Dialogues, Rousseau (writing of himself in the third person), denounces the ‘distortion’ which interpreted his thought as a call to rebellion: He always insisted on the preservation of existing institutions, holding that their destruction would only remove the palliatives while leaving the vices and substituting brigandage for corruption. [ . . . ] People stubbornly insisted on seeing a promoter of upheavals and disturbances in the one man in the world who maintains the truest respect for the laws and national constitutions, and who have the greatest aversion to revolutions and conspirators of every kind. (Rousseau, 1990b, 213) In Émile, the vicaire savoyard’s instructions follow along the same lines: While we await further knowledge, let us respect public order; in every country let us respect the laws, let us not disturb the form of worship prescribed by law; let us not lead its citizens into disobedience; for we have no certain knowledge that it is good for them to abandon their own opinions for others, and on the other hand we are quite certain that it is a bad thing to disobey the law. (Rousseau, 1993b, 328) Why, then, is Rousseau so often considered an archetypal revolutionary figure, the founding father not only of the French Revolution but even of the many revolutions which were to change the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Isn’t it the case that when Rousseau makes declarations in opposition to civil unrest and revolutions, he is only doing this out of

Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions

19

precaution, cowardice or inconsistency? Or, are we victims of a retrospective illusion, deriving from the symbolic use of Rousseau by the French Revolution? Does Rousseau have solid and substantial reasons to be wary of the idea of revolution and to adopt, in spite of all his criticisms of existing regimes, a conservative position, comparable to the one that Plato develops in Crito?

‘Short and Frequent Revolutions’: Force Against Force The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Even if certain of Rousseau’s arguments against revolution resemble those of Crito (notably in Émile 3), his position is, in reality, quite complicated. He is undoubtedly situated within a modern theoretical universe, which, following the monarchomachs, Algernon Sydney or John Locke, desacralized positive law and political authority, subjecting their legitimacy to the consent of the people. He turns his back on all remnants of what Pascal, for example, called ‘a mystical basis of the authority’ of law (Pascal, 1958, 294). In addition, he considers as obvious and inevitable the imminent revolutions against the European monarchies of his time. He writes in Émile: ‘The crisis is approaching, and we are on the edge of a revolution’. In a footnote, he adds: ‘In my opinion it is impossible that the great kingdoms of Europe should last much longer’ (Rousseau, 1993b, Book III, 188). In this prophecy one could find a justification for the events which were to unfold a little more than a decade after his death. But are such prophecies justifications? Would Rousseau, if he had lived longer, have participated enthusiastically in the revolutionary event? In order to attempt to resolve these difficult questions, we need to examine carefully the way Rousseau describes and analyses the phenomenon of revolution and to compare this to the aforementioned John Locke. Well before Émile, Rousseau already articulated a prophecy about future revolutions in a text which gives valuable indications about his position with regard to this prophecy. This passage is found near the end of the Discourse on Inequality. After having described the rational foundations of power and of laws, Rousseau explains how legitimate institutions can degenerate and how a justifiable inequality, based on merit, gradually decays into an aberrant and unbearable inequality, degenerating ultimately into despotism: Here is the last stage of inequality, and the extreme point which closes the Circle and touches the point from which we started. Here all individuals become equals again because they are nothing; and Subjects no

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longer having any Law except the will of the Master, nor the Master any other rule except his passions, the notions of good and the principles of justice vanish once again. Here everything is brought back to the sole Law of the strongest, and consequently to a new state of Nature. [ . . . ] Besides, [ . . . ] the Contract of Government is so completely dissolved by Despotism, that 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. Force alone maintained him, force alone overthrows him. Everything thus occurs according to the Natural order; and whatever the outcome of the short and frequent revolutions may be, no one can complain of another’s injustice, but only of his own imprudence or his misfortune. (Rousseau, 1992a, 65) It is interesting to note that in this text, Rousseau combines two political traditions and two vocabularies in a novel way. From Locke, Rousseau borrows the idea that despotism is a disguised form of the ‘state of nature’ and that the overthrow of the despot is no less legitimate than the exercise of power by the despot: both cases involve an act of war against an enemy. The revolt against the despot is a kind of a defensive war of the people against an enemy who started the war. But to this description of the revolutionary phenomenon borrowed from Locke, Rousseau inserts into his text a quite different perspective, one which reveals another influence: that of Montesquieu. The very vocabulary used by Rousseau testifies to this. He speaks of ‘the uprising that ends with strangling or dethroning a Sultan.’ The term ‘sultan’ refers to the traditional representation of despotism as the absolute exercise of power in Eastern empires (notably the Ottoman Empire). The act of ‘strangling or dethroning a Sultan’ is not mentioned by Montesquieu to describe a defensive act against oppression. It is not an act of liberation. It is, rather, a violent and anarchic means for replacing one illegitimate or usurped power by another illegitimate or usurped power. The overthrow of the sultan is not therefore described as an act leading to the restoration of the rule of law, but as sheer brute force, which substitutes one act of usurpation for another. This changes completely what it means to overthrow a despot. Rousseau states it clearly in the passage from the Discourse on Inequality previously cited: ‘Force alone maintained [the sultan], force alone overthrows him’. Thus, we do not have on one side an authority based on force and on the other an act which reestablishes the rule of law, but rather two acts both of


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which are purely and simply exercises of force. For Rousseau, force alone cannot serve as the basis for any political legitimacy. This is exactly what he repeats in The Social Contract: If I considered only force, and the effect that follows from it, I would say: as long as a people is compelled to obey and does obey, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke and does shake it off, it does even better; for in recovering its freedom by the same right by which it was robbed of it, either the people is well founded to take it back, or it was deprived of it without foundation. But the social order is a sacred right, which provides the basis of all others. (Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 1) This text, if read carefully, immediately dispels the hypothesis that makes the seizure of power by force legitimate, even if it is the force of the people. Rousseau writes: ‘If I considered only force, and the effect that follows from it, I would say . . . ’, and so forth. Now, Rousseau will make the effort to discover a foundation for power different from mere force, for he then goes on to say: ‘Force is a physical power; I fail to see what morality can result from its effects. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; at most it is an act of prudence’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 3). Admittedly, we cannot strictly speaking condemn the acts of force which result in the overthrow of tyrants, since they are the predictable consequence of the tyrant’s violent use of power. We can establish that a power based solely on force runs the risk of being overthrown by force and that this overthrowing is thus no more an illegitimate act than the tyrant’s exercise of power. But, not condemning is not the same thing as justifying.

Is the Judgement of a People in Revolt Necessarily Right? We now have several key indications for grasping the difference between the positions of Rousseau and Locke. But this difference must be further specified and elaborated. Richard Ashcraft has convincingly shown that the principal goal of the two Treatises of Civil Government was to justify philosophically the revolution against James II (Ashcraft, 1986). This justification aims at showing how a revolt against a tyrant can be an act comparable to which an executive power, within context of civil society, applies positive laws when punishing criminals. For Locke, the despot acts like the enemy of his own people; he wages war against them. He is thus, as Locke says, the real ‘rebel’ in the

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etymological sense of someone who recreates a state of war (bellum) within the civil order. Insurrection against the despot is thus an act of reestablishing the rule of law, more precisely, an act of vigilante justice. Locke is very clear about this in several passages from the Second Treatise (Locke, 1988, §204, §209 and §226). He shows at the beginning of this book that, in the state of nature, private individuals have a right to engage in violence as private individuals. In the state of nature, such an act of violence is an implementation of the natural law against the criminal (ibid., §10–13 and §20–1). In other words, for Locke there exists, even in the state of nature, an ability to judge according to the law and to enforce laws, an ability shared by all men. This is the ability which they then reclaim in situations of tyranny. All men, or at least most of them, are good judges of the lawful and the unlawful. They can thus take the place of judges and the place of positive laws once civil society is ‘dissolved’. This is just what happens in a revolution against tyranny. One may suppose, says Locke, that men do not foolishly take up arms against the sovereign. If they do, it is in judging according to their conscience and in the name of a demand for justice. Here, the anthropological optimism of Locke is very well illustrated: good people are in the majority; criminals are the exception. Thus when the people rise up, there is good reason to believe that they are acting in a responsible way and in the light of justice (ibid., §223, §225 and §230). It is obvious that Rousseau does not share this analysis of revolution and this is so for several reasons. To be sure, those who revolt and bring down a tyrant, if they were forced to defend themselves against an oppressive power, have not necessarily committed a condemnable act. But nothing guarantees that this legitimate defense will result in the establishment of a more legitimate authority. Nothing guarantees that a revolt has as its goal the establishment of the rule of law and political liberty. Nothing prevents one from thinking that this uprising will merely result in the replacement of one oppression by another. Rousseau says it explicitly several times. In The Letters Written from the Mountain, he writes that ‘in the majority of States intestine troubles come from a brutalized and stupid populace, [ . . . ] stirred up in secret by skillful troublemakers, invested with some authority that they want to extend’ (Rousseau, 2001, 299). In The Social Contract he uses history to support this idea, notably seventeenth-century English history. He twice evokes Oliver Cromwell to this end. In the chapter on ‘civil religion’ he compares Cromwell to Catiline and describes him as ‘an ambitious man’ and ‘a hypocrite’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book IV, chapter 8) who manipulated the naïve masses. In another chapter, criticizing Cromwell, he associates him with the Duke of Beaufort, one of the leaders of the Fronde


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against Mazarin in 1649. We need to keep in mind that the Duke of Beaufort was called ‘the king of Les Halles’ (‘Les Halles’ was the former central market of Paris). This nickname refers to his closeness to the common people whom he gathered to his side in the struggle against the ruling power. In this passage Rousseau condemns without compunction ‘all the nonsense of which a clever knave or an insinuating talker could persuade the people of Paris or London’ (ibid., Book IV, chapter 1). He thus highlights the risk that popular revolts can readily be made to serve the ambitions of potential tyrants. Nor does Rousseau approve the second major English revolution of the seventeenth century, the ‘Glorious Revolution’. This revolution, of which Locke was the theoretician and which partially carried out Locke’s program, did not lead, in Rousseau’s eyes, to the establishment of a more legitimate regime or to the abolition of servitude. Contrary to most eighteenth century French philosophers, Rousseau had no admiration for the English regime. By contrast, he describes it in harsh terms as a fraud, as a counterfeit version of the power of the people: ‘The English people thinks it is free; it is greatly mistaken, it is free only during the election of the Members of Parliament; as soon as they are elected, it is enslaved, it is nothing’ (ibid., Book III, chapter 15).

The Institution of the People These few remarks by Rousseau about revolts and revolutions in the modern era are very illuminating. The real problem, for him, is not to know whether a people is capable or not of revolting against a tyrannical power. Revolution is only one of the possible means to establish democracy, but that it is neither necessary nor infallible. The true condition for democracy is what Rousseau calls the ‘institution’ of the people. This complex notion has two meanings. In the first sense, the institution of the people is giving them political status, placing them in the situation of wanting and deciding for themselves. This situation, which Rousseau describes as the arrival of ‘a nascent people’ (ibid., Book II, chapter 7), is the result of variable, unpredictable historical circumstances. It could be (as with the Corsicans and the Poles) a war of liberation. It could be (as with the Hebrews and the Romans) the creation, out of a wandering and disorganized group, of a nation guided by a general will. It could also be, as was the case with the Genevans guided by Calvin, an internal reform through which people adopt new laws and a new form of life. Whatever the case may

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be, the problem is to recognize the will of that nascent people. One can notice, on that point, a certain closeness between Rousseau and Hobbes. Hobbes writes that it is impossible to know the will of the people as long as the sovereign didn’t formally call the people together. He concludes that the sovereign is the people, since he’s the only one who can decide who the people is and when the people talks (Hobbes, 2002, chapter VI, §1 and chapter X, §8). Rousseau certainly does not make the same conclusion. But he is sensible to the problem that Hobbes brings up. How can one be sure that a populace, a disorganized mass, expresses the will of the body politic? For Rousseau, an informal populace cannot claim that it is the people: Any assembly of the People not convoked by the magistrates appointed to that end and according to the described forms must be held to be illegitimate and everything done at it to be null; because the order to assemble must itself emanate from the law. [ . . . ] One cannot be too careful about observing all the formalities required to distinguish a regular and legitimate act from a seditious tumult, and the will of an entire people from the clamors of a faction. (Rousseau, 1997e, Book III, chapters 13 and 18) There is no people, in the political meaning, without some kind of institutional form that gives him the status of a body politic. That institution may certainly be different from a strictly political institution. For example, Rousseau thinks that Moses gave to the Hebrews, through religious institutions and laws, a general will, and transformed a wandering populace into a body politic. The idea of a pre-political institution of the people is undoubtedly problematic. Nevertheless, it is certain that the existence of a body politic can in no way be the result of a spontaneous and informal process. This first sense of the word institution is strongly connected with the institution in the second sense, that is to say, education. In both cases, the difficulty is to convert a sum of particular wills into a general will. There is no freedom without education towards freedom and this education is rare and difficult. In other words, the free people is not – or is not only – a people who frees itself from subjugation by a violent act. The free people is the one who is morally capable of freedom, who is educated towards freedom. Here is precisely the issue neglected by Locke: the moral precondition for freedom, or in other words, the idea that freedom is not the universal object of desire among men, but to the contrary, the desire for freedom is most difficult and most rare. Rousseau opposes Locke on this point not only in his political writings, but also in his pedagogical ones and in his reflection on the theologico-political


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question. The criticism of Locke is the same each time: Locke presupposes that man is most often and spontaneously a rational being. He thinks that freedom and reason materialize spontaneously in humanity if only the obstacles which prevent their development are removed. Locke underestimates the anthropological stakes of education. Education, that is to say, the cultivation of morals, can, so to speak, change human nature. Depending on whether it is more or less well carried out, it can be a training for servitude or an education in freedom. Now, moral education is most often an apprenticeship for servitude. In his Discourse on Political Economy, Rousseau writes: ‘Certain it is that in the long run peoples are what government makes them be. Warriors, citizens, men, when it wants; mob and rabbles when it pleases’ (Rousseau, 1997f, 13). This explains why the true condition of humanity is most often an accommodation to servitude: a ‘voluntary servitude,’ to use the expression of La Boétie, an author who, I think, greatly influenced Rousseau (Bachofen, 2002, 20 and 228–30). This idea may certainly seem paradoxical, given that Rousseau writes that freedom and human nature are consubstantial. But Rousseau in no way believes that humans, in fact, always love and really desire freedom, are aware of its demands, and are ready to pay its price. All humans are potentially free, but all humans are not actually free: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 1). These chains are not in essence physical and external; they are moral and internal. Democracy is not possible if people are not educated to freedom. In the text on Poland, addressing the issue of freeing the serfs and their integration into the sovereign body politic, Rousseau shows the difficulties of this enterprise: I am sensible to the difficulty of the project of emancipating your peoples. [ . . . ] Freedom is hearty fare, but hard to digest; it takes very healthy stomachs to tolerate it. I laugh at those degraded peoples who, letting plotters rouse them to riots, dare to speak of freedom without so much as an idea of it, and, their hearts full of the vices of slaves, imagine that all it takes to be free is to be unruly. Proud and holy freedom! If these poor people only knew you, if they only realized at what price you are won and preserved, if they were only sensible to how much your laws are more austere than the tyrant’s yoke is hard; their weak souls, the slaves of passions that should be stifled, would fear you a hundred times more than servitude. [ . . . ] To emancipate the peoples of Poland is a grand and fine undertaking, but bold, dangerous, and not to be attempted thoughtlessly. Among the precautions to be taken, there is one that is indispensable

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and that requires time. It is, before everything else, to make the serfs to be emancipated worthy of freedom and capable of tolerating it. [ . . . ] Emancipate their bodies only once you have emancipated their souls; without this preliminary, be prepared for your operation to turn out badly. (Rousseau, 1997a, 196–7)4 The real engine of history is thus neither physical power nor violence which create and destroy regimes which are always illegitimate and improperly founded. The real hidden engine of history is culture, that is to say, the manner in which social and political institutions shape moral habits. We now understand why Rousseau is so skeptical about the ability of the great European peoples of his time, and specifically of urban populations, to lead revolutions that are more than mere mutinies preparing new kinds of subjugation. The dominate passions among residents in Paris or London are passions which are hardly compatible with a real exercise in political freedom. In the text on Corsica Rousseau writes: ‘Selfishness makes [the inhabitants of cities] servile, and idleness makes them restless; they are either slaves or mutineers, never free men’ (Rousseau, 1986, 291). Being a ‘mutineer’ does not of itself make one ‘free.’ On the contrary, mutiny, as a sudden and ephemeral expression of a desire for freedom, bears witness to the fragility and superficial nature of this desire for freedom. Basically for Rousseau, if people need to engage in mutiny, it is because they have allowed servitude to take hold. Here once again, the concept of ‘voluntary servitude’ is key to understanding his point of view. When people exist in servitude, when they have allowed tyranny to take hold, this is not simply the result of bad luck. For Locke, we can say that tyranny is the result of bad luck, an unfortunate event which justifies the exceptional awakening of the people. Their sovereignty ceases to be ‘dormant’ just long enough to depose the tyrant. For Rousseau, if people need to be awakened, this generally means that it is already too late. A people which only awakens itself on occasion is one which most often is not interested in its own freedom. The Social Contract, in order to explain the institution of the people’s representatives, speaks of ‘the cooling of the love of fatherland, the activity of private interest’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book III, chapter 15). A people which only awakens itself fleetingly is one which is asleep most of the time, and which is, therefore, incapable of freedom: its revolts thus have little chance of bringing it freedom. For avoiding servitude, such brief and violent awakenings are not sufficient. Something else is necessary, that is to say, people who are constantly awake, vigilant people. What is needed is a people whose great and constant


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concern is political freedom. Modern peoples attending merely to their private affairs only pay attention to public matters in an episodic way. This is both the sign and the cause of their political immaturity. It is unlikely for them to institute, even by way of revolt, a true democracy. We can thus understand the very harsh judgement levelled against the English who ‘think they are free,’ but ‘who are slaves’ and ‘are nothing.’ Even the ‘citizens’ of Geneva who complain about abuses of the Little Council are, Rousseau writes, ‘completely absorbed in their domestic occupations and always cool about the rest,’ they ‘consider the public interest only when their own is being attacked. [ . . . ] Always distracted, always deceived, always fixed on other objects, they let themselves be led astray about the most important one of all, and always go looking for the remedy for lack of having known how to prevent the ill’ (Rousseau, 2001, 293). Here, once again, Rousseau’s logic is very close to that of La Boétie, who refuses to explain tyranny by bad luck, fate or the power of the tyrant. Tyranny always results from laziness, blindness or the moral corruption of the people. To bring down the tyrant, according to La Boétie, only one thing is necessary: that the people want their own freedom: ‘Be resolved to serve no more and you will be free.’ This seems to be such a small thing. But if tyranny is so common, it may well be that the authentic desire for freedom is much more difficult and much more unusual than we might think, especially if we have not sufficiently reflected on the conditions of freedom in the strong sense.

Can Modern Peoples Actually Attain Freedom? Should we then consider Rousseau as being resigned to the inevitability of voluntary servitude and of seeing no political future for the great European peoples? I would claim that here, once again, the answer is complicated. Rousseau definitely does not share Locke’s anthropological optimism. He does not agree with Locke’s belief in what Rousseau calls in Book IX of The Confessions and in his writings about Saint-Pierre’s projects ‘perfected reason’ [‘la raison perfectionnée’], that is, confidence in the spontaneous progress of humankind toward rationality. This idea was adopted by many of Rousseau’s contemporaries and illustrated in an exemplary way at the end of the eighteenth century by Condorcet. But it is also not correct to say that Rousseau is absolutely pessimistic. If he were absolutely pessimistic, he would have formulated a philosophy of history. He would claim to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the possibilities of modern humanity and

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would declare that it had become structurally incapable of freedom. To attribute such a philosophy of history to Rousseau is a retrospective interpretation. It is to make him say more than he really did. For Rousseau, contingency and unpredictability must be given their full due in history. He does not believe in any kind of determinism and especially not in sociological determinisms. In Émile he writes: ‘we know not what nature allows us to be’ (Rousseau, 1993b, Book I, 33), and in The Social Contract : The people assembled, it will be said! What a chimera! It is a chimera today, but it was not so two thousand years ago: Have men changed in nature? The bounds of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think: It is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that constrict them. Base souls do not believe in great men: vile slaves smile mockingly at the word freedom. (Rousseau, 1997e, Book III, chapter 12) If human ‘nature’ has remained the same from the time of the Roman republic to the modern era, this is because in both epochs human nature harbors misrecognized moral and political resources. Rousseau says as much in his text on Poland: ‘When reading ancient history, one believes oneself transported into another universe and among other beings. What have Frenchmen, Englishmen, Russians, in common with the Romans and the Greeks? Almost nothing but their shape. The strong souls of the Romans and the Greeks appear to them to be exaggerations of history.’ But he adds: ‘Yet they did exist, and they were humans like ourselves; what keeps us from being men like them? Our prejudices, our base philosophy and the passions of petty self-interest, concentrated together in all hearts by inept institutions in which genius never had any share’ (Rousseau, 1997a, 79–80).5 That modern peoples do not, for the most part, know freedom is not due to some kind of inevitability. It is rather because of a dominant philosophical and cultural tendency, of ‘prejudices’ which portray as a necessity that which only results from a lack of genius and imagination. Rousseau thus reacts against the idea that political freedom, in the strong sense in which he understands it, has become outdated and is an anachronism to be relegated to ancient history. In this sense, he is opposed to yet another aspect of Locke’s thought, one which will be important for later thinkers like Benjamin Constant and Isaiah Berlin. He opposes the idea that democracy is indeed the destiny of modern peoples, but in a residual, minimalist form, that of representative democracy in which the people are most often halfasleep. He thus does not claim that modern peoples would be condemned to servitude. Evidence of this is found in the interest which he shows in the


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Corsican and Polish insurrections, as well as in his writings which supported the Genevans who contested the usurpation by the Little Council. However, one should never ignore how, in these three cases, he carefully examined the moral and cultural situation of the peoples in question before engaging himself on their side. He writes, the Polish people ‘dares to call for a government and laws, as if it had only just been born. It is in chains, and debates the ways to remain free! It feels in itself the kind of force which the force of tyranny cannot subjugate’ (ibid., 178). Rousseau infers that ‘in a State like Poland [ . . . ], souls still have great resilience’ (ibid., 218). In effect, the Poles ‘have just given a forever memorable example’ of ‘the love of fatherland and of freedom animated by the virtues inseparable from that love’ (ibid., 238). The specific nature of the Corsican and Polish insurrections, their organized and almost institutional forms, as well as the moral dispositions to discipline and courage manifested, forbid considering these insurrections as informal and anarchic mutinies. Based on his faith in these initial empirical proofs, Rousseau decides to move from theory to practice, putting his wisdom in the service of political freedom: I believed myself to be speaking to a people which, while not free of vices, still had some resilience and virtues, and on that assumption my project is a good one. But if Poland is already at the point where everything is venal and rotten to the core, then it is in vain that it seeks to reform its law and to preserve its freedom, it has to renounce doing so and bow its head to the yoke. (Ibid., 242) Perhaps more than any other author, Rousseau exhorts us to change the world as it now exists. But he does it in his own special way. He brings about a revolution within the philosophical revolution of modernity. If the revolution of modern political philosophy is characterized by the belief in the necessary advent of democracies, Rousseau seems to be a conservative applying the brakes to such enthusiastic ardor. In reality, he is only conservative in the sense that this belief in democracy necessitates for him, as a precondition, a moral revolution. Such a contribution to modern revolutionary thought is, as we might say, anti-modern. It constitutes a reminder of forgotten lessons taught by the republics of ancient history. The revolution which Rousseau operates within modern revolutionary thought must thus be understood in the first sense of the word ‘revolution,’ that is to say, a return to an earlier situation, a closing of a circle. This is the sense in which his teaching is revolutionary for us moderns. Nurtured by the lessons of ancient history, he reminds us of what we most often refuse to

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understand and yet more than ever need to understand. Without a revolution in culture, ‘freedom is but an empty word and legislation but a chimera’ (ibid., 239).

Notes 1

They are especially linked to Robespierre’s dictatorship and the time that immediately followed. The transfer of Rousseau’s remains to the Pantheon had been decided by decree as of 25 Germinal of year II (14 April 1794), and several weeks later Robespierre delivered an enthusiastic eulogy. But the transfer itself did not take place until after the fall of Robespierre, 17 Vendémiaire of year III (8 October 1794). Cf. Roussel, 1972, 11–15. 2 Letters of 6 November 1766 to Taulès and of 12 November 1766 to Damilaville, cited by Robert Osmont (Rousseau, 1995b, 1639). 3 ‘Oh, Émile, where is the man who owes nothing to the land in which he lives? Whatever that land may be, he owes to it the most precious thing possessed by man, the morality of his actions and the love of virtue’ (Rousseau, 1993b, 524). Cf. Plato, Crito, 50a–52a. 4 Cf. The Dedication to the Second Discourse: ‘Freedom is like those solid and rich foods or those hearty wines, which are proper to nourish and fortify robust constitutions habitued to them, but which overpower, ruin, and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are unsuited for them’ (Rousseau, 1992a, 4). 5 And in the conclusion: ‘All these great Ministers who, judging men in general in terms of themselves and those around them, believe they know them, cannot begin to imagine what resilience the love of fatherland and the surge of virtue can impart to free souls. Regardless of how often they are duped by their low opinion of republics which offer to all of their undertakings a resistance they did not expect, they will never abandon a prejudice based on the contempt which they feel they themselves deserve and in terms of which they judge humankind’ (Rousseau, 1997a, 257).

Chapter 2

The General Will and National Consciousness: Radical Requirements of Democratic Legitimacy in the Writing of Rousseau and Fanon Jane Anna Gordon

Introduction Rousseau’s concept of the general will has been attacked as totalizing, romantic and repressive and as turning on a capacity for clear and transparent willing that regular citizens do not, in fact, possess. Still, its vision of political legitimacy has captured the imagination of many readers by suggesting the radical requirements of modern, legitimate, democratic life. Several genealogical lines have been drawn from Rousseau’s classic formulation of the general will to figures that both embrace and reject such relations of indebtedness. And yet, as I hope the following discussion convincingly demonstrates, it is in conversation with Frantz Fanon that the irredeemably political dimensions of Rousseau’s writings, their revolutionary import, are best revived. At the core of Frantz Fanon’s work is a theory of political transformation of how colonized people, through revolutionary action saturated with tragedy, error and reversals, remake themselves into self-governing citizens. In contrast, one has to piece together how, in the work of Rousseau, one would move from the dire conclusions of the Second Discourse to the fragile alternative outlined in the Social Contract. Rousseau was consistently ambivalent about unfolding futures, always sensing that currents that undercut the shared conditions of political life were stronger than their antidotes. Fanon, by contrast, would never qualify his insistence upon the need for people to act with agency in history.

Rousseau on Method Rousseau’s life as the man who was canonized began with his controversial reflections on the possibility of work in the arts and sciences contributing to

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the moral improvement of humankind. He famously challenged that such work was most developed in societies that were not the most moral but the most amply resourced to indulge their greatest vices. He suggested that most men who undertook such work did so in idle pursuit of reputation and rewards and could neither know if they had discovered truth nor discern how it could be constructively put to use. Although he defended the work of a small group of self-educated and uniquely gifted men including Verulam, Descartes and Newton, who were satisfied to labor on uncompensated, quietly discerning the secrets of nature, he urged most readers to consult their conscience for the philosophical guidance they needed to be good, productive and public-spirited citizens. His index for measuring the value of arts and sciences was whether or not they contributed to an increase in the virtue of men and women. In his assessment, the opposite tended to be the case. Rousseau’s Second Discourse or effort to theorize the origins of inequality among human beings added subtlety to these initial claims. In it he emphasized that the most useful and least advanced of human knowledge is that of man and asked how we could understand inequality without knowing human beings themselves. He began by cautioning his readers: O man, whatever may be your country, and whatever opinions you may hold, listen to me: Here is your history as I believe I have read it, not in books by your fellow men, who are liars, but in nature, who never lies. (Rousseau, 1992a, 19) The aim of discerning a nature of man independent of culture, or of upbringing, education and habits, was what Rousseau thought could reveal the history of the species. Through so doing one could create a point of view from which to assess one’s own times with regret if not despair and to imagine whether they could be otherwise. This endeavour most essentially required clarifying what constituted relevant questions rather than rushing prematurely to resolve them. Rousseau famously stated: Let us therefore begin by setting all the facts aside, for they do not affect the question. The Researches which can be undertaken concerning this Subject must not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasoning better suited to clarify the Nature of things than to show their genuine origin. (Ibid.) For Rousseau, addressing what it means to be a human being cannot be done through recourse only to facts all of which are gathered with reference to guiding hypotheses that may be deeply flawed. To get to the root of what

General Will and National Consciousness

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we are therefore required a different kind of exercise, one in which we imagine how we became what we are through postulating the absence of our conditions of possibility. This meant, for Rousseau, imagining a world without sociality, of pre- or asocial creatures that, with nothing but sporadic contact with other human beings, easily drew on their natural physical strength to meet their minimal needs. In Rousseau’s account, it was only as the world became more populated and human contact more regular that human beings developed abilities upon which we now rely. Centrally, with sustained engagement, we began immediately to make comparisons (now not the straightforward one that human beings tended to be superior to non-human animals) about the relative endowments of different people. This capacity was a foundation both for the kinds of abstract thinking involved in understanding the connections between particular interests and needs and more general categories that Rousseau thought were necessary to political life and also to our ability to distance ourselves from the feelings of suffering of others that once arrested us. Rousseau was keenly aware of the ways in which our guiding interests shaped what we were or were not able to see in the world around us. He was particularly struck by the travel writings of European explorers of his own day, writings that were treated by many distinguished philosophers as legitimate empirical data on African, Asian and New World peoples. Such travellers, Rousseau insisted, seemed incapable of perceiving human difference: For three or four hundred years since the inhabitants of Europe have inundated the other parts of the world, and continually published new collections of voyages and reports, I am persuaded that we know no other men except the Europeans [ . . . ] In vain do individuals come and go; it seems that Philosophy does not travel. (Ibid., 84) Philosophy with a capital ‘P ’ was the kind that he (and Hobbes) criticized in his First Discourse. Unlike philosophy or critical reflection, its sources and products were vanity and vice, the rationalization of political worlds that were fundamentally illegitimate. Rousseau noted the role of Christian missionaries in this work. In particular, he suggested that their skills were not the same as those necessary to undertake work in the human sciences. The former seemed able to articulate the worthiness of potential converts only by likening them to one, undifferentiated European notion of human character. Rousseau wrote: [T]o preach the Gospel usefully, zeal alone is necessary and God gives the rest; but to study men, talents are necessary that God is not obligated to give anyone [ . . . ] [t]hese People [ . . . ] have known how to perceive, at

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the other end of the world, only what it was up to them to notice without leaving their street; and that those true features that distinguish Nations and strike eyes made to see have almost always escaped theirs. (Ibid., 85) Rousseau concluded that although Europeans had set themselves up as the world’s judges, in the kind of role that Fred Dallmayr insists that those undertaking work in comparative political theory avoid, their understanding of the peoples that they relegated to lower order species was at best superficial projection (Dallmayr, 2004). They had missed a unique opportunity to engage in human study and failed to employ what Claude Lévi-Strauss called ‘the methodological rule for all ethnology’ that he thought Rousseau had presciently described thus: ‘When one wishes to study men, one has to look close by; but in order to study man, one has to learn to cast one’s eyes far off; first one has to observe the differences in order to discover the properties’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, 305 and Rousseau, 1988). Their aims had not been actually to learn about the people about whom they felt compelled to write, but instead to aggrandize themselves and offer rationalizations for such illegitimate self-enrichment: [W]e know nothing of the Peoples of the East Indies, who have been frequented solely by Europeans more desirous to fill their purses than their heads. All of Africa and its numerous inhabitants, as distinctive in character as in color, are still to be examined; the whole earth is covered by Nations of which we know only the names – yet we dabble in judging the human race. (Rousseau, 1992a, 85–6) For Rousseau, the endeavours in which we are involved set the terms of the worlds that we encounter. One cannot assume that research and writing about human beings is more than a refracted mirror of the perceptions that will best enable us to realize our aspirations.

On Illegitimacy and Its Alternatives In his Social Contract, Rousseau had described both conquest and enslavement as impossible to articulate in terms of political right. The former could create a subjugated multitude or an aggregate but neither an association, polity, nor people. Both turned on the so-called right of the strongest or the claim that any individual or people who overcame others did so legitimately. Rousseau contended that force could elicit little more than acts of


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necessity and prudence. Without independent acts of consent, these simply set one person’s private interest up against those of others, reflecting a readiness to divide the human species into ‘herds of livestock, each with its leader, who tends it in order to devour it’ (Rousseau, 1994d, 132 and 137). Against Aristotle, Rousseau asserted that if there are slaves by nature it is ‘because there have been slaves contrary to nature’ (ibid., 133). In other words, although Rousseau conceded that many people’s ability to resist was compromised by their experiences of enslavement, he insisted with what Frederick Douglass later explored more fully, that to make human beings slaves is a political achievement that requires ongoing brutal reinforcement. The relations of masters to their slaves are not a reflection of relations demanded by their unequal natures (Douglass, 1982). In Rousseau’s account, illegitimate rule, as opposed to legitimate selfgovernance, emerges as minor differences in physical endowments of one generation compound over-determining the fate of their descendants. What is essential for him is not the fact of inequalities and disparities of wealth but the relationships among people that they inevitably produce. Most, argued Rousseau at the end of his Second Discourse, would have to ingratiate themselves to others who would denigrate them precisely because they relied on their labor. Cunning, self-deception, avarice and cultures of violence would become normal behavior, and the ability to perceive the shared conditions of collective thriving, the core of public-spiritedness, would corrode. In such societies, political institutions and laws frequently failed to create a genuine alternative to rule by force. Although less immediately corporeal in their effect, through the introduction of institutions and laws, they transformed usurpation and theft into a right of whoever was best disposed to impose their will over and against others. For Rousseau, the possibility of legitimate government was easier to envisage than to realize. Still, trying to imagine people as they are and laws and institutions as they might be, he offered his effort ‘to square the circle’ through the idea of the ‘general will’ the pursuit of which was the only legitimate basis of government. Formed through an act of convention that gives life to a common self, city or people, the general will makes the foundation of society possible. Consisting in what the differences of all members of a polity have in common, it is an outgrowth of what emerges when members think together in their capacity as citizens about their shared well-being. Rousseau contrasts the kind of reflection this demands with the sort one does as a private person considering one’s own individual needs and wants. The latter, when expressed and aggregated, is the ‘will of all’. It may, but will not always, coincide with the general will. Although all general wills are

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partial to the extent that they are not universal and are always rooted in a limited people and place, the general will is broader in scope than the wills shared by groups or organizations within the polity. Each of these will also have a sense of the conditions that enable their respective project’s thriving, but these do not aim to be as general as the society itself. The general will therefore is also an effort to describe the scope of political identity. Between the universal and the particular, what is general to a people is determined by the shared context of their lives. This can be defined in the negative, as Max Weber outlined, when he wrote that people recall that they share states when they are attacked in war with other nations (Weber, 1994). It is also conceded as people defend the need for domestic infrastructure, for roads, technology that reliably allows for communication and transportation, and for minimizing the decimation of a necessarily shared natural environment. Rousseau clearly wrote in a world in which the local and international were not quite as cross-cutting and interpenetrating as in our own day, but he did still underscore how easily political identities could be undermined by narrower forms of loyalty. It was very easy, he lamented, for each citizen to minimize the significance of his or her disinvestment from political life and to see idiosyncratic individual preferences as a more meaningful and significant expression of who they were. Although the general will can at times be reached numerically through voting, with the significance of an issue determining the requisite scale of endorsement, Rousseau stresses that ‘that what generalizes the will is not so much the number of votes as the common interest that unites them, because in this institution everyone necessarily submits himself to the conditions he imposes on others, an admirable agreement between interest and justice which confers on common deliberations a quality of equity that vanishes in the discussion of private matters’ (Rousseau, 1994d, 149). The general will then not only frames what functions as law, guiding its efforts to do so is the larger aim of minimizing the kinds of inequality that would lead to fundamentally antagonistic interests between members that would make it impossible for them constructively to see their fates as intertwined. Finally, Rousseau’s general will, as Jason Niedleman has argued, stresses two ideas at the core of the very project of democratic self-governance (Niedleman, 2000). Its content must be willed by everyone to which its resolution pertains and its substance must be capable of being defended as the best outcome or as right for all who will be affected. In principle, its content can be universally communicated. In other words, the general will holds in tension the requirements that active citizenship alone can, the need for popular willing, because this is what is understood to be the basis


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of legitimacy in democratic regimes and rational willing since democratic outcomes are what we seek from democratic procedures. Thus the general will is also an effort to grapple with how to make an abstract sovereign people present in politics by, as Margaret Canovan has argued, uniting the individual and collective dimensions of citizenship in the realization of the general will (Canovan, 2005).

The Case of Corsica Rousseau clearly argues that the general will is more audible in healthier societies in which public life is real and primary, with coherent and demonstrable meaning for its members. As living projects, polities begin to die at birth. One can prolong their coherence, but even where health does exist it is fragile and can easily erode first and foremost as people regularly come ‘to view what [they owe] the common cause as a free contribution, the loss of which will harm others less than its payment burdens him’ (Rousseau, 1994d, 141). Once this becomes a norm, the social bond that was given public expression in and through the general will ‘is broken in all hearts’ and ‘the basest interest brazenly adopts the sacred name of the public good’ (ibid., 198). Still, in these circumstances, Rousseau insists that the general will is neither annihilated nor corrupted. It is easily ignored for it is largely rendered mute. Once the conditions for maintaining the organizing core of a polity crumble, societies can be mended neither by reform nor by revolution. On the other hand, there are general wills that are still emerging or still in the making. Rousseau considered this to be the case with the island of Corsica for which he was asked to play the role of legislator. Christopher Kelly writes that what interested Rousseau in this task was precisely the island’s reputation as a European backwater, as the opposite of French and English models of eighteenth-century strong states. Kelly writes, ‘Rather than seeing Corsica as merely the uncivilized abode of bandits in need of colonial rule by a continental power, he regarded it as the one place in Europe still capable of receiving a sound legislation’ (Kelly, 2005, xxiii). Formerly colonized by the Moors and then the Genoans, the framing question of Rousseau’s work was how the island could aim to become a genuinely post-colonial state: how to move it out of conditions of economic dependence and poverty. He surmised that this would require figuring out how to transform its primarily agricultural economy into an asset, most ambitiously how to translate its produce into international capital. Rousseau

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insisted, as Fanon on postcolonial states would later, that the newly independent Corsicans should not aim to emulate the culture of their former colonizers, but to lead a concerted national effort to identify and cultivate its indigenous resources, most centrally its people. This would require Corsicans treating Corsica as its own economic and political center, rather than as an outpost or appendage to the political economy of the mother country of its colonizers. One indispensable resource for this project was that Corsicans were not decadent; they did not display the individual and collective vices of their supposedly more civilized Western counterparts. This, for Rousseau, meant that they remained spirited. Still, this strength could easily collapse into widespread banditry, especially if people grew impatient with the project of building a legitimate democratically governed state. Rousseau argued that they did not need to become different from how they were but to preserve this in the absence of a shared enemy that united them across differences. They could do so by directing their collective forces toward maintaining their independence (Rousseau, 1986, 125). Rousseau insisted that the characterization of Corsica as a lumpenproletarian island of people more inclined to be thieves than hard-working citizens obscured the origins of these predilections in the culture of colonialism itself. He wrote, Who would not be seized with horror against a barbarous Government that, in order to see these unfortunate people cutting each other’s throats, did not spare any effort for inciting them to do so? Murder was not punished; what am I saying, it was rewarded [ . . . ] [I]t had as its goal [ . . . ] keeping them from rising up, from being educated, from becoming rich. Its goal was to get all produce dirt-cheap from the monopolies of its officials. It took every measure for draining the Island of money in order to make it necessary there, and in order always to keep it from returning to it. (Ibid., 137) In other words, Corsicans had come to deplore labor not only because it was, under colonial conditions, a pure loss to them, but also because it was a seemingly permanent and destructive sentence. It was from this condition that Rousseau now hoped the Corsicans could emerge. He recommended a temporary isolationism that would enable the island to increase the internal interdependence of its regions, making a culture of cultivating and depending on their own forces (ibid., 125). Rousseau underscored the appropriateness of different governmental forms to different environments and argued that such a rustic place was


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best fit for a democracy. Ironically, the counties and jurisdictions that the colonists had introduced and the destruction of the local nobility that they had overseen could facilitate a transformation in this direction: A strategy that had been devised to subdue the Corsicans could be reemployed to enlarge their equity and freedom. It was key to avoid certain errors so frequently made, however. Rousseau insisted that political creativity would be necessary to assure that different parts of the island did not develop unevenly, with the administrative capital thriving as everywhere else fell into economic stagnation and a small group of cities drew in all of the aspiring bourgeoisies that produced nothing. A government surely did require a center, but this would be a purely administrative one that public men occupied only temporarily before returning to the other dimensions of their lives. Rousseau hoped this might forestall the drawing of cultivators away from the countryside that would be and would have to be affirmed as Corsica’s real source of strength (ibid., 132). Rousseau sought to figure out how to link political privileges not to amassed wealth but to productive labor. He therefore aimed to avoid what he considered the debasing introduction of money, arguing instead for the use of a strict system of exchange. He explained that money was useful only as a sign of inequality, particularly for foreigners. One could make exchanges of goods themselves without mediating values, creating storehouses in certain essential places. Ultimately, he reminded his readers that political independence, their ultimate aim, required that all lived well without becoming rich. He insisted repeatedly that the ease and health of politics were two fundamentally different concerns and that the latter should be their focus. Efficiency, in other words, though a modern ideal, was also often an antipolitical one. In the absence of money and taxation, citizens could be asked to contribute in kind through labor. If roads needed to be built, it would be the citizenry who would have to do it. Rousseau concluded with reflections about the qualities of human beings. Here echoing Hobbes, he wrote that it is fear and hope that govern men. Parting company there he qualified that fear only holds people back lest they not face punishment, that it is only hope that can lead men and women to act. The task then was to awaken the nation’s activity, literally to give it ground for great hopes. Not a hope linked to sensual pleasure, but to a substantive pride that he explained involves ‘esteeming oneself based on truly estimable goods’ (ibid., 154). Nothing, he wrote, is more ‘really beautiful than independence and power.’ What could sustain the character of a newly articulated nation was to maintain and deepen activity and life in the entire state by paying close attention to the emerging nature of civil power,

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to assure that it would take the form of legitimate authority rather than abusive wealth. With the latter, Rousseau noted, where wealth dominated, power and authority would separate – to obtain wealth and authority would become two separate tasks with the implication that apparent power was with elected officials while real power was with the rich who could buy their authority. Such practices could only lead to disappointment that would spread languor throughout the island. The greatest asset of the Corsicans was that unlike most of their modern European counterparts they remained capable of freedom rather than merely obedience. But the cultivation of a viable political economy would determine whether this could be mobilized in pursuit of a general will or whether a will of some would illegitimately prevail claiming the legacy of the fight for the island’s post-colonial condition.

Devouring Methods and Sociogeny Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, among many other things, is a meditation on method, in particular, a dialectical reflection on how one studies and understands health and sickness in black encounters with whites in an antiblack world. Fanon, like Rousseau, was concerned about the ways in which the legitimacy of certain kinds of facts could block the larger project of understanding human beings. In Fanon’s case, the status of these facts was linked to a naturalistic framework that biologized racism, suggesting that a sense of black inferiority was lying dormant within black bodies, activated, not created, by colonization. He wrote, ‘Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny [ . . . ] But society, unlike biochemical processes, cannot escape human influences. Man is what brings society into being’ (Fanon, 1967, 11). The turn to ‘facts’ in reductionistic approaches to the social sciences was, Fanon suggested, an effort to belie precisely this, to render us mere mechanisms without the agency that could introduce either contingency or meaning into the social world. He explicitly rejects this central tenet, that ‘lead[s] only in one direction: to make man admit that he is nothing, absolutely nothing – and that he must put an end to the narcissism on which he relies in order to imagine that he is different from the other “animals”’ (ibid., 22). Fanon refuses to so surrender, ‘grasping [his] narcissism with both hands [ . . . ] [he] turn[s] [his] back on the degradation of those who would make man a mere mechanism’ (ibid., 23). He emphasizes, ‘What matters for us is not to collect facts and behavior, but to find their meaning’ (ibid., 168). In the absence of such meaning, one participates in


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‘[a]n endless task, the cataloguing of reality. We accumulate facts, we discuss them, but with every line that is written, with every statement that is made, one has the feeling of incompleteness’ (ibid., 172). To explore this phenomenon and its alternatives, Fanon insisted that our methods themselves must become a question. One cannot assume that methods are not part of the colonial projects that so determine the character of the world of which they are a part. We cannot be sure that they do not produce rather than give an account of the very kinds of relations that Fanon sought to interrupt. He writes of his own aims and those of a radically humanistic political theory, ‘The prognosis is in the hands of those who are willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots of the structure [ . . . ] Reality for once, requires a total understanding’ (ibid., 11). In spite of the exhaustiveness of much psychological literature, they often, by contrast, ‘lose sight of the real’ (ibid., 83). Fanon continues in a spirit much like the opening of Rousseau’s Second Discourse : It is good form to introduce a work in psychology with a statement of its methodological point of view. I shall be derelict. I leave methods to the botanists and the mathematicians. There is a point at which methods devour themselves [ . . . ] I believe that the fact of the juxtaposition of the white and black races has created a massive psychoexistential complex. I hope by analyzing it to destroy it. (Ibid., 12) If for Rousseau the index of the quality of writing is its capacity to compel virtuous action, for Fanon ‘truth’ is what sets or enables the creation of conditions for people to encounter one another as human beings. He states, ‘It is not possible for me to be objective’ (ibid., 86). He describes his own text as a ‘mirror with a progressive infrastructure, in which it will be possible to discern the Negro on the road to disalienation’ (ibid., 184).

Manicheanism and Liberation The context of this alienation is one of political illegitimacy, of coercively created and maintained inequalities outlined in the Wretched of the Earth. This describes what the construction of a Manichean world, a world violently divided in two – one strongly built of stone and steel in which garbage disappears and people, white and foreign, are well-nourished with covered feet; the other densely populated by people who are dark and hungry, who

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seem to crouch with envy – does to human relationships. This is precisely the culture of dependence that Rousseau condemns but here theorized not through imagining what Karl Marx later called the first moment of primitive accumulation but through its extenuation in global relations created through colonization and enslavement. Fanon offers a phenomenological portrait of both sides, of what it means to see oneself as bringing values and civilization to outposts and backwaters, as making history, creating an epoch, embodying an absolute beginning and what, in contrast, it means to be treated as ‘a negation of’ or ‘the enemy’ of values, to be a deforming element that is thought to disfigure all that is beautiful or moral; what it is to be the telos toward which others hope to move, defining the terms of their development and what, in contrast, it is to be referred to in zoological terms, as reptilic, stinking and gesticulating within what many think would, if left uninterrupted, have remained a prehistorical vacuum (Fanon, 1963, 41). How would these Manichean poles meet to discuss anything shared? The thought of the possibility is patently absurd. To sustain such a situation of disparity requires the bayonet not the ballot or collective deliberation in which one can trust that others may better understand what avowed institutional principles intend. Fanon adds insight to Rousseau’s claim on the one hand that there is no right to slavery and that the slave is right to escape as soon as he can and on the other that slavery creates ‘natural’ slaves or habituates people to a set of conditions that make their legitimate escape extremely difficult to achieve. While underscoring the form and nature of these constraints, that one risks death and humiliation if one aims to challenge the coordinates of a Manichean world, Fanon writes that the ‘native admits no accusation,’ that he is ‘overpowered but not tamed,’ ‘treated as an inferior but not convinced of his inferiority’ (ibid., 53). He lives in a permanent dream to switch places, with the basic insight that ‘the showdown [between the colonizer and colonized] cannot be put off indefinitely’ (ibid.). Until such time, however, members of the colonized community do live with an anger that is perpetually lit. The explosions are inevitable but the targets the undeserving and the battles ultimately displaced. In addition, the colonized easily forget how fundamentally unstable the power of the colonizers ultimately must be. Unlike Rousseau, however, integral to Fanon’s theory is an account of how people struggle through such conditions toward a legitimate alternative of how people refuse complete habituation and seek to become the kinds of subjects that can create the polities they deserve. Fanon emphasizes, without romance, what is involved. He writes,


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National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. At whatever level we study it [ . . . ] decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men. Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution. (Ibid., 35)1 Success entails nothing less than a social structure changed entirely from the bottom up. Fanon is clear: this kind of transformation only emerges when it is ‘willed, called for, demanded’ (ibid.). Its crude form, felt in the consciousness of the colonized and feared as a terrifying possible future by the colonizers, must manifest itself in what can only be an historical process. Neither magic nor nature can substituted for the meeting of two opposed groups whose relations were created and sustained in history through violence. In Fanon’s writings, although there are organic intellectuals who, thrown out of established urban party politics, are retrained through their experiences of living within the peasantry of more remote areas, there are no singular outsiders who emerge as Rousseau’s legislators helping the colonized to envision what they must become. The colonized must claim themselves the equal of the settlers. What makes this possible is when in the moment of an actual fight the colonized realize that they fight human beings like themselves, that the life, breath and heart of the colonizers share the strengths and limitations of their own form. With this grasp of the lies at the core of the social rules that have forcibly regulated their lives, they easily begin to crumble: For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone. I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence; in fact, I don’t give a damn for him. (Ibid., 45) People once weighed down by their ‘inessentiality’ now emerge as ‘privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them.’ (Ibid.) Decolonization unites the people by a decision to ‘remove from it its heterogeneity’, to unify on a national, sometimes racial, basis. For native intellectuals who have imbibed and defended the Greco-Latin pedestal as their own, these all become lifeless, dead words. They have nothing to do with the conflict in which they are engaged. The language of individualism is

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replaced with the vocabulary of family and trusted friend. Fanon writes, ‘Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred – or everyone will be saved’ (ibid., 47). In such a context, truth is the property of the national cause. ‘Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the natives, and ruins the foreigners’ (ibid., 50). In other words, the Manichaeism of colonial society continues in the early stages of articulating the emergent general will that demands and must culminate in the end of colonial relations. The slogan of non-violence – an attempt ‘to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table’ – is that of the colonized bourgeoisie who share more with their colonial counterparts than with their mobilized, primarily rural countrymen (ibid., 61). Ironically for those outlawed members of the group, the lumpenproletariat, it is their willingness to fight violently that reintegrates them into a community that has seen them as predatory pariahs. Their violence now directed at shared enemies whose presence is fundamentally a crime is, writes Fanon, their ‘royal pardon’ (ibid., 86). This violence is constitutive; its practice binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning. The groups recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible. The armed struggle mobilizes the people; that is to say, it throws them in one way and in one direction. (Ibid., 93) This mass mobilization introduces into the consciousness of each person a sense of common cause, a collective past, and a national destiny. This forms a cement which, mixed with blood and anger, will be the basis for the building up of a nation. And yet Fanon’s discussion of violence is more pedagogical than romantic. There is no alternative literally to seizing one’s freedom but many of its consequences are tragic. Revolutions, even the most legitimate ones, involve monstrous moments and highly imperfect decisions. There is absolutely no doubt that the people responsible for the fighting will themselves be deeply and irretrievably scarred. As Lewis Gordon has argued, they are a generation comparable to Moses, ones that lead to a promised land that they themselves cannot enter (Gordon, 2008). Many among them will wonder,


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with Rousseau, whether they risked all of what they did for a future that intensifies the very relations they aimed to overthrow. For Fanon, it is not sufficient for one group of people wielding the right of the strongest or a will of some to supplant another. Instead an ending of colonialism must imply the creation of a different set of relations, specifically, politically legitimate ones. It is in outlining the substance of these that Fanon distinguishes between national consciousness and nationalism, effectively historicizing and reworking Rousseau’s notion of the general will. At the political economic level this first would require nationalizing the economy through wholesale and resale cooperatives run on a democratic basis, decentralized so as to involve as many people as possible in public affairs. This, Fanon explained, had been abandoned in capitalist countries that governed with law backed only by economic strength and the police. In addition, as Rousseau also had suggested with Corsica, the nation’s capital would have to be remade and deconsecrated. Party members would not reside in the capital, which inevitably would lead to the widely observed trend toward overpopulated and overdeveloped centers flooded by people who left poorer regions abandoned and unsupported. It would be necessary to privilege the interior rural areas politically, seeking out every opportunity for contact with rural masses and making national policy for them, in an effort to recognize and remain in immediate touch with those who had fought for independence. Government leaders could not act as if the citizenry were incapable of understanding the complexity of self-governance. If they began to, it would serve them well to recall how capable, in the mist of revolutionary struggle, these same individuals had shown themselves to be. For Fanon states clearly, ‘the party is not an authority, but an organism through which they as the people exercise their authority and express their will’ (Fanon, 1963, 185). The people would need ample opportunities to remain watchful, to ‘realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion, in the true understanding of their interests, and in knowing who their enemies are’ (ibid., 191). Only through so doing would the Algerian people develop a clear sense that they together owned the soil and mineral wealth of the country and that they could be or could become equal to whichever problems they would face. To enable this, those officially placed in charge of setting the conditions for self-government would have to remember that it would be worth being less efficient if the cost of the smooth and quick exercise of business would be the exclusion of people from the processes of planning.

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For formerly colonized people together to articulate their collective purpose and direction they would necessarily participate in meetings in which people would listen and speak, opportunities in which ‘the brain increases its means of participation and the eye discovers a landscape more and more in keeping with human dignity’ (ibid., 195). Seductive short cuts of every variety would have to be stringently avoided. To cultivate and reclaim a nation would require sending young people into schools and fields rather than sports stadiums; the turning out of fully conscious human beings rather than a slim fraction of exceptional leaders; political education rather than the inculcations of inspiring slogans. On this score, Fanon describes this final distinction: What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is up to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves. (Ibid., 197) The totality of the nation must be a reality for each citizen, its history part of personal experience of all. Fanon continues, Individual experience, because it is national and because it is a link in the chain of national existence, ceases to be individual, limited, and shrunken [ . . . ] In the same way that during the period of armed struggle each fighter held the fortune of the nation in his hand, so during the period of national construction each citizen ought to continue in his real, everyday activity to associate himself with the whole of the nation [ . . . ] If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then that bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swimming across the river or going by boat. (Ibid., 200–1) A national government must seek to enlarge private aims and interests illustrating concretely the ways in which each individual’s shared well being is tied to that of others who together must now move toward the constructive work of building an inhabitable political world. To do this nationalism must transform into a consciousness that does not become sterile and empty. Fanon writes, ‘The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent, enlightened action of men


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and women. The collective building up of a destiny is the assumption of responsibility on the historical scale’ (ibid., 204). The national government must be for and by the people, and Fanon adds, also for and including the outcasts. No leader can be a substitute for a popular will. Concerns about national prestige should never upstage priorities of ‘giv[ing] back their dignity to all citizens, fill[ing] their minds and feast[ing] their eyes with human things, and creat[ing] a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein’ (ibid., 205). This formulation sustains all of the features that make the idea of the general will compelling while transcending many of its limitations: both Rousseau and Fanon challenge the adequacy of mere proceduralism, the sense that to tally cast votes itself constitutes a democratic outcome, but in Fanon the general will is not discovered but authored. In Fanon’s account the aim is not to try to emulate the work of G-d here below but instead to forge models of a shared future realizing that we alone can create the conditions of our own political adulthood. The general will for him is not articulated by each citizen in isolation considering the quiet voice of G-d within him, but emerges out of the deliberate challenging of all forms of unfreedom. Fanon also makes contemporary Rousseau’s discussion of more partial wills that create obstacles for clearly grasping the general will; if for Rousseau smaller general wills can form within societies and sustain intense loyalties that interfere with identifying interests as large as society itself, for Fanon these divisions usually run along ethnic and religious lines and are a symptom of political failure. They are cultivated, indulged or sought as a refuge when the project of forging a no-longer-colonial future is prematurely and opportunistically abandoned. Their resurgence is a direct reflection of the deliberate shutting down of fluidity of living political culture for sedimented relations or a narrow nationalism that enables the enrichment of a small few, the national bourgeoisie, over and against others. The aftermath of the effort to give concrete form to a formerly colonized general will is disappointment. Rousseau himself had been ambivalent about the question of revolution. His writings inspired insurrectionary activity from the French Revolution to Fidel Castro, but Rousseau himself feared that many efforts at political reform in fact enhanced the chains under which people lived; that whenever change was deliberately sought in the hope of expanding freedom, the few who knew what would come of the transformations were the one’s who had worked out how financially to profit from them. For Fanon, the national bourgeoisie did precisely this, hijacking the revolution and reducing national consciousness to narrow nationalism.

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This congenital problem was due largely to their intellectual laziness, ‘spiritual penury’ and ‘profoundly cosmopolitan mind set’ (ibid., 149). Fanon writes, Now, precisely, it would seem that the historical vocation of an authentic middle class in an underdeveloped country is to repudiate its own nature in so far it as it is bourgeois, that is to say in so far as it is the tool of capitalism, and to make itself the willing slave of that revolutionary capital which is the people. In an underdeveloped country an authentic national middle class ought to consider as its bounden duty to betray the calling fate has marked out for it, and to put itself to school with the people: in other words to put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and technical capital that it has snatched when going through the colonial universities. (Ibid., 150) Instead of this heroic and fruitful path, the national bourgeoisie retreated into a cynically bourgeois existence. Ignorant of the local economy and of its mineral, soil, or mines, they would instead talk cultishly of small-scale artisanry and about the groundnut harvest, cocoa crop and olive yield. They were, Fanon lamented, satisfied to continue as Europe’s farmers, generating unfinished products in ways that would not shift the global division of labor inaugurated by colonization and black and brown enslavement. They said nothing of creating factories that could generate wealth for the nation and themselves; they made no outcry about the absence of industry. They thoroughly lacked the entrepreneurial, pioneering aspects of the early European bourgeoisie, Fanon balks; beginning at the end, they are ‘already senile before [they have] come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, or the will to succeed of youth’ (ibid., 153). The national bourgeoisie, once concerned about the dignity of the country, moved into and maintained formerly colonial homes and business offices. Uninterested in recasting rural and urban divisions or the global map, they simply settled into a world whose terms were determined from outside. African unity, an idea that brought immense pressure against colonialism, required the cultivation of political-economic conditions for its possibility. In the absence of these, it disintegrated. Nationalism quickly collapsed into chauvinistic thinking and language that fueled religious and ethnic rivalries now mobilized as grounds for economic leverage under conditions of scarcity. The national bourgeoisie remained content with what Rousseau referred to as the will of all, here really of some, reinforced by the so-called right of the strongest.


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These difficulties were further entrenched by political leaders who, once associated with the aspirations that led to independence, refused to challenge the national bourgeoisie. Literally bringing the people to a halt, such leaders, argues Fanon, expelled them again from history, attempting to pacify them into sleep, waking them only occasionally to recall the colonial period and distance from there that had been traveled. ‘[T]he militants [therefore] disappear[ed] into the crowd and [took] the empty title of citizen. Now that they ha[d] fulfilled their historical mission of leading the bourgeoisie to power, they [we]re firmly invited to retire so that the bourgeoisie [could] carry out its mission in peace and quiet’ (ibid, 171). The strength of the police force and army intensified in direct proportion to the stagnation into which the nation sunk.

Conclusion There are remarkable similarities in Rousseau and Fanon’s cautions that prevailing perceptions of authoritative social scientific methods may discourage us from asking the most salient of political questions. For both, the possibility of legitimate political life turns on identifying what the differences of members of a polity share while refusing to reify forms of diversity that are the products of a lack of political possibility. This in turn requires defending the need for economic conditions that are not so radically unequal that all political argumentation turns on rationalizing such disparities as natural and necessary. Rousseau oscillates between radical irreverence and cold feet – for instance, unveiling the illegitimate bases of most modern polities while suggesting that once corrupted, polities cannot be reformed; insisting at the same time that all people ultimately seek liberty and that people in some climates were not capable of institutionalizing it. Overemphasizing such passages, however, can obscure Rousseau’s record of challenging the compliance of generations of readers with the compromising of their freedom. His scathing criticisms of modern European life inspired not only Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, but also ordinary citizens yearning to create political communities that more ably mirrored unities living but submerged within social life. Fanon brought to these analyses the insight of a sober psychologist who knew that nature could offer no idyllic refuge. More willing unambivalently to confront the contradictions that Rousseau inspired his readers to identify, Fanon fruitfully historicized and reworked Rousseau’s insights refusing to collapse into what can be read in Rousseau as moments of conservative

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nostalgia. Fanon’s political thought is instead characterized by high modernism, a modernism from below, that insists that we alone can be the source of political models under which we live. Fanon would have regretted the failure of Algeria to become no longer colonial even in the aftermath of revolutionary struggle. Still, this, for him, would never have served as a refutation of the need for people to act with agency in history. It would instead have affirmed that questions of political life can never be settled once and for all.

Note 1

Rousseau suggested that in situations of enslavement, the enslaved were entitled violently to rebel so long as their efforts were likely to be effective. However, Rousseau’s discussions of violence do not describe collectivities facing one another – they are either highly individualized as in the case of the sole slave or a discussion of the way that the right of the strongest is presented as a legitimating force of ‘laws’ that are not an expression of the general will.

Chapter 3

Rousseau and the Terror: A Reassessment Julian Bourg

Introduction Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been blamed for the Terror of the French Revolution for a long time (Davies, 2006 and Gough, 1998). Once it was brought to life by Jacobin voluntarism, his theory of the general will, an imagined unanimity subordinating the parts of the nation to the whole, is supposed to have justified and facilitated the guillotine’s busy work. The charge began early with reactionary critics of the revolution, for whom the Terror was the crowning, horrifying achievement. Joseph de Maistre, for instance, saw the revolution and Terror as divine punishment and called Rousseau ‘the most self-deceived man who ever lived’ (Maistre, 1994, 42). In the nineteenth century, Hippolyte Taine was not alone in drawing a link between the author of The Social Contract and the Terror, especially in the person of Robespierre. Of Rousseau’s thought, he observed that, ‘The dogma through which popular sovereignty is proclaimed thus actually ends in a dictatorship of the few, and a proscription of the many’ (Taine, 1878, 2:20).1 Of course, later left-wing Republicans and especially Marxists excused the Terror as a legitimate expression of popular justice against counter-revolutionaries, the price of forging the common good through the elimination of those who impeded it. Rousseau was thus the prophet of bourgeois egalitarianism, which was good enough for some, but which for others was a potentiality eventually developed by Marx and realized by the Russian Revolution. However, with the analysis of mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism a sustained critique of the Terror, and Rousseau’s central role in it, came into focus. Anti-totalitarian thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon, R. R. Palmer and Hannah Arendt tried to save ‘good’ values that could be linked to the democratic revolutionary tradition from the taint of violence, thus defending liberalism against fascism and communism (Berlin, 2002; Talmon, 1952; Palmer, 1941; Arendt, 1951). Both these systems, in spite of their tremendous differences, were traced to a collectivist ethos located in a selective reading of the Social Contract.

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This anti-totalitarian reading of Rousseau’s pernicious influence on the French Revolution has proved durable. For the past 30 years, the interpretation has been linked to François Furet, who continues to tower over French Revolutionary historiography since his death in 1997. His admonition, first published in 1978, that ‘the French Revolution is over’ was a provocative rebuttal to the Marxist interpretation of 1789 just mentioned. Denouncing this ‘revolutionary catechism,’ as he put it, Furet argued that the Terror was ‘an integral part of revolutionary ideology’, an ideology that turned on the Jacobins’ voluntarist fantasy of Rousseauean unanimity. Although Furet was careful to distinguish between Jacobin appropriations of Rousseau and the overlooked complexity of his thought, the implication was clear: the Terror was not the result of mere circumstances; rather, the revolution had been genetically predisposed to extreme violence. The revolution’s bicentennial in 1989 championed the Furetian view, even among English-language commentators. Simon Schama wrote that, ‘In some depressingly unavoidable sense, violence was the Revolution itself,’ and Keith Michael Baker described how Rousseau ‘wrote the script’ for Jacobinism. The judgement has continued into the new millennium, with Furet’s student Patrice Gueniffey writing in 2000 that terror is a ‘necessary product of revolution’ in general (Furet, 1981, 62 and passim; Schama, 1989, xv; Baker, 1990, esp. chapter 4; Hesse, unpublished, 1; Gueniffey, 2000, 202; see also McDonald, 1965; Hampson, 1983; Blum, 1986 and Swenson, 2000). With apologies to Furet, the French Revolution may be over, but it is not altogether clear that the historiographical Cold War is. In what follows, I would like to present a plausible interpretation of the phenomenon of the Terror adequate to our post–Cold War era before turning to a brief reassessment of Rousseau’s place in French political culture of 1793–4. I will conclude with a counter-factual exercise: reversing the formula of reading Rousseau through the Terror, and instead read the Terror through Rousseau, who we might imagine as a critic of democratic state violence as much – or more – than a resource for it. Together these qualifications – the extrinsic context in the 1790s and the intrinsic arguments of The Social Contract – allow a reassessment of Rousseau’s relationship to the bloodshed of the French Revolution.

Terror as the Political Vacuum of the French Revolution Recently, the intellectual historian Samuel Moyn has made the provocative suggestion that, as it turns out, Furet’s model relied heavily on a decisive

Rousseau and the Terror

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and unacknowledged source: the democratic theory of Claude Lefort (Moyn, 2008). And it is this theory, and not Furet’s liberal version of it, that is of interest. Lefort has argued that the revolutionaries of 1789 attempted to substitute ‘the people’ for the king but held onto a unitary and transcendent form of kingship; the death of the king and the assault on kingship opened up a void, a vacuum, or what Lefort calls the ‘empty place’ of democracy that could never be fully re-occupied by a notionally unified people (Lefort, 2005; and discussion in Flynn, 2005).2 The pressing question in 1793 was what to do about the empty throne once the king was executed in January of that year. Something was missing for the cohesion of the social body, but it could not simply be replaced, for in a democracy, everyone is in charge and therefore no one person or group can be. The problem was that ‘the people’ could not be found. They were everywhere and nowhere. This is a politically constitutive situation: plurality and division are hardwired into democracy. In contrast to the Old Regime, modern society is ‘disincorporated,’ which means that a gap, a symbolic empty place, prevents society’s harmony with itself (on disincorporation see Lefort, 2007, chapter 15). In 1790s France, the persistence of the empty place of the political was evident. The crucial question is: What exactly flooded into that empty space created by the collapse of the Old Regime? Ideology alone – for instance, the Rousseauean idea of the general will – explains very little. The weakness of Cold War-era interpretations of the French Revolution was precisely to have emphasized ideology over circumstances (on ideology and circumstance see Hesse, 2001). The Terror was created by an interpenetrating confluence of factors and forces that rushed in to fill a vacuum. Such surging factors and forces, well known to students of the revolution, included: the elimination of kingship, the urban/rural divide, religion, foreign and civil war, popular violence, law, conspiracy, factional strife, technology and influential individuals such as Maximilien Robespierre. The sheer density of the Terror is what impresses today. Its interacting elements set in motion dynamics that built on one another and escalated in such a short span of time, creating a kind of simultaneous condensation. Dialectics of intensification took hold, and violence, over-determined and chaotic, was one result. Just as ‘the people’ could not be found, so too, the ‘enemies’ of the revolution were everywhere and nowhere. Fear that has no object becomes paranoia. The increasingly desperate attempt to fill the democratic void in the name of democracy but in reality against the experience of it thus created a paroxysm and cyclone of violence. There was no precise beginning to the Terror, but nor is it plausible that the Terror can be treated as the consummation or essence of the revolution

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as a whole. It was part of the revolution. There was nothing inevitable about it, although given the momentum of its dynamics there was perhaps something irresistible about it. The word ‘terror’ itself held different meanings to different parties. Often it merely described great anxiety and fear, but eventually it did describe a strategy, first ascribed to the enemies of the revolution before being taken up by the revolutionaries themselves. The notion of the Terror as a coherent system, however, emerged ‘after the fact’ in Thermidor, the period of the revolution that opened with the fall of Robespierre. Curiously, it was the Thermidorians and not the agents of the Terror on the Committee for Public Safety who succeeded in interring Rousseau’s remains in the Pantheon. The revolutionary state of the 1790s – a decidedly incipient state in flux – never managed before Napoleon to secure a monopoly on violence. JeanClément Martin has argued that the absence of a strong state in the 1790s led directly to an eruption of different kinds of violence, from local vendettas to civil war to revolutionary justice (Martin, 2006, esp. chapter 5).3 As German jurist Carl Schmitt (himself no fan of democracy) would say, there was no single sovereign power able to decide when the situation of ‘extreme peril’ had passed and the state of emergency related to the suspended constitution of 1793 could end (Schmitt, 2005, 6). In spite of rhetoric about the people, the nation, the revolution, there was no one to decide. It is worth noting in passing that, like Furet, Schmitt saw in Rousseau’s theory of the general will a template for revolutionary sovereignty. He was no less critical, but for different reasons: the people or the nation expressed a mere ‘organic unity’ that was inferior to a king’s decision-making power (ibid., 49). In short, ‘the people’ are not a person. And yet – here is the important point – the revolution never succeeded in pulling together in practice the organic unity imagined by Rousseau or the Jacobins. Gaps remained. For as much as revolutionary discourse and practice were unitary in aspiration, they were entirely messy in execution. What James Swenson has called the revolution’s ‘constitutive instability’ was not just semantic or semiotic; it was physical, bodily and real (Swenson, 2000, 225).

Rousseau in the Terror This orienting snapshot of the Terror as a dynamically interactive historical phenomenon irreducible to ideology or texts leads to the question of Rousseau’s role in it. To be sure, the topic has been thoroughly explored. There is no doubt that by 1793 his thought had spread through the ranks


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of elected representatives, journalists and the general public – various factions and actors seeing in him what they wanted (Hesse, 2005). I would like merely to add a minor qualification to this established historical judgement. An examination of debate at the National Convention, the Jacobins and Parisian culture more generally during the Terror and the first months of Thermidor demonstrate the limited ways in which Rousseau was evoked. I have relied on the semi-official Le Moniteur universel between July 1793 and November 1794. The picture of Rousseau that emerges is of a Genevan citizen who wrote foundational books for the revolution as a whole and education in particular, who is an authority to be cited and celebrated, but also of someone capable of error and who can be surpassed. The invocation of ‘J.-J.’ in order to justify violence during the Terror is altogether rare. The link between Rousseau and Geneva was a constant reference in the mid-1790s, as news trickled back from Switzerland and as Genevan citizens in Paris promoted their favorite son. In July 1793, a festival in his honor was held in his hometown. In December, citizens there demanded that a statue of him be erected within six months. In May 1794, Genevan citizens in Paris, claiming that Rousseau belonged to all nations, called for a French festival; and three months later, in the very edition of the Moniteur that described the fall of Robespierre and his allies, word came of Rousseau’s global revolution being forcefully defended on the shores of Lake Geneva. In August, the Swiss ambassador addressed the Convention, noting the French appreciation for ‘this Hercules of the political’ whose ‘pen,’ together with the arrow of William Tell, were the ‘great instruments of liberty’. In October, a certain citizen Adet from outside Geneva wrote to the Convention that arms were necessary to reestablish and maintain sacred principles, and that Rousseau had seeded the tree of liberty.4 The plan for a Parisian festival honoring Rousseau had been in the works for some time. In November 1793, the philosopher’s old confidant and admirer, the aristocrat René Girandin, had proposed that Rousseau’s remains (which he possessed) be placed on an island in the Seine planted with poplar trees; he also offered to change his name to Émile in order to prove his loyalty to the revolution. At the May 1794 assembly where Genevans had called for a French Rousseau celebration, Jean Debry proposed that his remains be moved to the Pantheon – an appeal he repeated several months later in front of the Swiss ambassador. That event finally took place in October 1794, the National Convention’s procession ‘surrounded by a tricolor ribbon’ and preceded by a copy of the Social Contract, that ‘lighthouse of legislators’.5 Other disparate symbolic and cultural gestures were noticeable in these years; for instance, in October 1793 the town of Montmorency changed its

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name to Émile; and in April 1794, Bertrand Barère denounced counterrevolutionaries in Marseille who had destroyed busts of Rousseau and Voltaire. Perhaps significantly, or merely just coincidentally, a flurry of theatrical iconicity took place at the moment of the Great Terror (June–July 1794). Three different plays were staged: L’Enfance de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (May), Rousseau’s own Pygmalion (June) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau à ses derniers moments (July) – his entire life cycle from childhood through adult authorship to decline and death acted out against the backdrop of the guillotine’s busiest months. Fawning aesthetic tribute was perhaps best exemplified by Marie-Joseph Chénier’s ‘Hymn to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ in October 1794, the same month as the interment in the Pantheon. The chorus cheered: O Rousseau! Exemplary wise man Humanity’s benefactor Accept the tribute of a proud and free people And defend equality to the depths of the tomb.6 Iconicity was linked to authority. Rousseau was to be celebrated and revered as a person. For example, the playwright Charles de Pallisot got in trouble in September and October 1793 for his play The Philosophes in which a character alleged to be Rousseau fell on all fours to stuff his mouth with grass. Pallisot, however, defended himself and had his certificat de civisme restored. Two months later, Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, brought before the Convention on counter-revolutionary charges, pleaded his bona fides by declaring that a bust of Rousseau rested on his mantel, alongside those of Brutus and Benjamin Franklin. Citing Rousseau in speeches at the Convention and Jacobins in 1793–4 was an effective form of authoritative iconicity, his words lending credence to a speaker’s arguments. And yet, examples of such appeals were relatively infrequent when one considers the overall profusion of discourse during the revolution, and he was often invoked on comparatively tangential issues, given the gravity of the revolutionary crisis of Year II. For instance, Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois from the Committee for Public Safety and Abbé Gregoire from the Committee on Public Instruction both quoted Rousseau’s barbs against the English. Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that Émile and not the Social Contract was on revolutionaries’ minds in 1793–4. A speaker at the National Convention in August 1793 cited Rousseau on the education of the poor. In June 1794, Barère noted Rousseau’s belief that education was the yeast that made men rise. In October 1794, Abbé Gregoire and François Boissel invoked him on the issues of ‘the social arts’ and public instruction. For many decision makers, ‘Jean-Jacques’ was more a pedagogue than a political theorist.7


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Finally, pointing away from the judgement that Rousseau was a decisive resource for the Terror is the fact that revolutionaries became increasingly comfortable dismissing him. In October 1793, a speaker at the Convention denounced the burning of suspect books by noting that Rousseau himself had dedicated one of his works to the Prince of Orange. In November, the Convention rejected the idea that Rousseau’s image be affixed to a new pendule décimale, opting instead for the martyr Jean-Paul Marat. In January 1794, someone proposed that the widow of Challier – Jacobin martyr in Lyon – be given the same pension as Rousseau’s widow since Challier had actually done more for the revolution than Jean-Jacques.8 By Thermidor, it became easier to criticize Rousseau. The fact is ironic given the transfer of Rousseau’s remains to the Pantheon in October 1794. For instance, that month, the Abbé Gregoire could both cite Rousseau as an authority and then note that while he had said some useful things on science, his views on the inevitable failure of large republics and how representation diminishes a people’s freedom – these were questionable. One last and poignant example will suffice to make the point. In September 1794, Rousseau’s widow, Thérèse Levasseur, arrived at the Convention with two manuscripts the philosopher had given her with instructions delivered on this deathbed that they remain sealed until 1801. In the subsequent debate, Barère made the provocative claim that the revolution had in fact speeded up time; thus, there was no need to wait until the new century. Others disagreed. But then Jacques-Alexis Thuriot spoke, suggesting that the manuscripts be sent to the Committee on Public Instruction to determine their value or ‘danger’. He concluded his proposal that the package be opened by arguing that ‘the particular will must cede to the general will’. The irony could not have been lost on those assembled. The manuscripts were soon read and discussed publicly. Rousseau the author had been surpassed by the revolution he had helped set in motion.9 Geneva, festive celebration, aesthetic production, iconic authority – the picture that emerges of Rousseau in 1793 and 1794 had immediately very little to do with the violence associated with the Terror. With respect to the version of the Terror briefly introduced above – as over-determined chaos in a democratic void – these strands of revolutionary Rousseauism can be treated as rather minor or occasional elements. There are obviously exceptions – in April 1794 Saint-Just called Rousseau a revolutionary – and there is no doubt that generally speaking Rousseau was an intellectual resource for the dilemmas and tensions of revolutionary culture.10 And yet, there is not a great deal of evidence that the revolutionaries themselves placed Rousseau at the conceptual center of the Terror’s political violence. Robespierre at times mentioned Rousseau before he joined the Committee of Public Safety in

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July 1793 but less so afterwards. Rousseau’s political thought may help us describe the moment of the Terror, but it is less clear that the protagonists of the Terror themselves found in his political thought the means by which to solve the dilemmas with which they were confronted in 1793–4. Moreover, there seems to have been considerable continuity in how Rousseau was evoked by revolutionaries during the Terror and early Thermidor. The issue of transferring Rousseau’s remains, for example, seems to have had no relation whatsoever to the dynamics of the Terror. In 1793–4, talk about the content of the Social Contract and especially the issue of political violence was strikingly absent, apart from some obscure Swiss voices. Insofar as the Terror witnessed a thematization of violence, Rousseau was indeed not a useful resource, since it was emergency government and not the general will that became crucial from October 1793 to July 1794.

Rousseau on Violence What would the Terror have looked like through Rousseau’s eyes? To answer that question one would have to reverse the old formula of reading Rousseau through the lens of the Terror. Such a counter-factual exercise would show his congenital rejection of violence. That Jacobins may have read Rousseau selectively is a normal and comprehensible consequence of reception history; yet it is worth pausing on the fact that if he did help write the ‘script’ for the revolution, then he would have been an especially disappointed and disgruntled playwright once the curtain went up on his supposed work. I will focus on the issue of violence in the first three books of the Social Contract. Some discussions of violence there might indeed have come from the mouths of the likes of Robespierre, Saint-Just and Georges Couthon; others provide ammunition for a powerful critique of the revolution from the fall of 1793 to the summer of 1794; and still other of Rousseau’s points remain stubbornly ambiguous. In the first two books of the Social Contract, violence appears as a problem related to the establishment of sovereignty, its preservation and the risk of disestablishment. The third book focuses more exactly on the issue of governance. One might say that violence rests at the origin of the social contract in so far as the growing insecurity of the state of nature propels men and women to enter into association. But Rousseau is clear that force itself cannot establish the contract, and that primitive violence lies outside it. The citizen has above all given up his ‘power to harm others’, and equality ensures that ‘power should fall short of violence’. Nevertheless, the issue of foundational


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violence will continue to haunt the Social Contract (Rousseau, 1988b, Book I, chapters 1–4 and 11). Rousseau next addresses the two post-contractual issues over which violence may appear: how to preserve association and what threatens it. The contract is internally binding on those within it, and force may be used to make members of the social body comply. Although the sovereign body cannot ‘want to harm’ any citizen, a kind of supervisory violence can be used to enforce the contract. It is here that Rousseau makes his infamous statement that ‘anyone who refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the entire body [ . . . ] he will be forced to be free.’ Related to this supervisory violence intended to preserve the body politic is the self-sacrificial violence the state can ask its citizens to undertake. One must ‘fight if necessary for the homeland’, which involves ‘certain risks, even certain losses’. In a sense one is fighting for oneself as a member of the polity, but again, such sacrificial violence is subordinate to supervisory force (ibid., Book I, chapter 7 and Book II, chapters 4–5). On the fringes, as it were, of this state violence is the ever-present possibility of subversive or destabilizing violence that threatens to disestablish the fundamental association. The body politic can ‘annihilate itself’ by undoing its most basic, constitutive contract. This self-annihilation need not be accomplished by bloodshed – the sovereign may will its own disestablishment – yet it is easy to read liquidation as a kind of violence. More likely, though, an individual’s ‘power to harm others’, prohibited by the contract, will reappear. With respect to the body politic, a ‘wrongdoer’ becomes a ‘rebel and traitor to his country’ and can be executed as an enemy according to the laws of war. Supervisory and sacrificial violence thus combine in the use of force to preserve sovereignty against violence that may subvert or destabilize it. The issues of supervisory and subversive violence converge when Rousseau turns in Book II to ‘the people’ and the possibility of a foundational violence that accompanies establishment, even though he has to some extent excluded this possibility in Book I. The well-known passage introduces the ambiguous combination of the revolutionary birth of a new order with death-courting violence that would occupy thinkers from De Maistre to Marx to Arendt. Describing the interaction between the lawgiver and the people, Rousseau writes that, although it is best that a ‘young’ nation be shaped by a fundamental law: [T]here are, sometimes, in the life of a state, violent epochs when revolutions do to peoples what certain crises do to individuals, when the horror

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of the past takes the place of memory, and when the state, set ablaze by civil wars, is reborn, so to speak, from its ashes and, issuing from the arms of death, regains the vigor of its youth. (Ibid., Book II, chapter 8) And yet this revolutionary rebirth runs the risk of chaos, for a newly formed social being is vulnerable to ‘disturbances’ that may ‘destroy it’ and whose chaos leads the people, not toward lawgivers and liberators, but toward dictators and masters who ride a wave of ‘public panic’ and pass ‘destructive laws’ (ibid., Book II, chapter 8). So what are we to make of these treatments of violence in Books I and II of the Social Contract? There seem number of points the protagonists of the Terror might endorse: ‘anyone who refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the entire body’; citizens must fight and risk their lives for the state; wrongdoers are rebels and traitors subject to the laws of war; the fires of revolution can enable a nation to be reborn. And Robespierre might have seen himself in Rousseau’s assertion that although a lawgiver must ‘destroy’ that which interferes with establishing the law, his superior character traits prevent him from becoming a tyrant. Yet as Rousseau notes, such traits are rare. Might he not have observed in 1793 and 1794 the loss of liberty, the hunger for a master and not a liberator, usurpers and tyrants riding a wave of ‘public panic’ and passing ‘destructive laws’? As he writes in Book II, chapter 5, too many executions – and the Terror was nothing if not too many executions – actually show ‘weakness or laxity in the government’ (ibid., Book I, chapter 7 and Book II, chapter 5). It is in Book III of the Social Contract, however, that Rousseau makes his strongest criticisms of how violence undermines a republic as a matter of governance. Violence is the result of a confusion of roles: for example, ‘if the magistrate [instead of the legislature] wishes to make laws [ . . . ] disorder follows upon order [ . . . ] and the state thus dissolves into despotism or anarchy.’ Furthermore, there is the problem of scale. Large populations need ‘more repressive force’ and thus a larger state. But the bigger the state, the greater the risk of an abuse of power. If ‘the prince’ makes ‘public force’ too much his own, ‘two sovereigns’ are created: the government and the people. Again on the issue of scale, this time of territory and not population, Rousseau observes that the ‘force’ of tyrannical governments is more effective ‘over great distances’. France, of course, had both a large territory and a sizeable population. The dilemma for democracy is even more complicated, given its relation to contingency and chance: no other government is more ‘subject to civil wars and domestic unrest as a democratic or popular government’. Was the Terror then the result of a confusion of


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governance roles, proportion, democracy’s structurally instability, and the tendency of the government to become an alternate sovereign (ibid., Book III, chapters 1, 4 and 8)? Rousseau makes much of this last point, which seems a prescient critique of bureaucracy. Government is disposed to a ‘continual effort against sovereignty’. Consequently, either the government contracts and acts like a ‘master and tyrant’, or the state dissolves, which results in the ‘abuse of government’ called anarchy. In either case, deterioration and disestablishment are the result. One symptom of the government’s contraction is its growing ‘horror’ when faced with the people; it ‘discourage[s] the citizens from holding’ assemblies. The Committee for Public Safety’s conservative attack on popular societies and the Commune fits here (ibid., Book III, chapters 10, 14 and 18). In the final chapter of Book III Rousseau comes closest to identifying the issue of the undecidability I associated with the Terror above. ‘[C]hanges are always dangerous’, he says. A ‘regular and legitimate act’ must be ‘distinguish[ed] from a seditious act, and the will of an entire people from the clamor of a faction. [ . . . ] [T]he prince must [ . . . ] preserve its power in spite of the people, without incurring the possible charge of usurpation’. Throughout the revolution, and especially in the Terror, determining a ‘regular and legitimate act’ from a seditious one, and the will of the people from a faction, was the entire problem. Robespierre and his cohort always believed they were acting for the people while they were preserving their power, but they were unable to defend themselves from the charge of usurpation. Hence the label assigned to Robespierre and others on 9 Thermidor that has resonated ever since: tyranny (ibid., Book III, chapter 18).

Minimizing Rousseau’s Influence on the Terror The Terror was a complex phenomenon that transpired in the empty democratic space opened by the collapse of the Old Regime. The people were in charge but could not be found; to represent them was to betray them. The revolutionary state was unable to achieve a complete monopoly on violence, though it killed many people trying to do so. Circumstances were what ultimately drove the Terror. The foundational and constitutive moment of modern French democracy was unstable, chaotic, dense, indecisive (in Schmitt’s sense) and caught in an intensifying whirlwind of conflicting forces. The Terror was over-determined, and its essence was irreducible to ideas and books alone.

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Rousseau undoubtedly played a crucial role in the French Revolution. There were indeed many Rousseaus. By the mid-1790s his influence was felt everywhere, even indirectly. The two different examples discussed here – empirical evidence of his minor explicit role in 1793–4, and a counter-factual reading of the Social Contract as a resource for a critique of the Terror – could be explored further, and numerous exceptions could be found. The view that draws a straight line from Rousseau to the Terror flourished in the Cold War and continues to linger. Its roots go back to early reaction to the revolution that was often deeply hostile to democracy. In contrast, one might imagine Rousseau as less of a decisive force on the revolution than he is often taken to have been. Or rather, alongside his considerable symbolic and real presence, in other ways he was also a bit player in a drama that surpassed his life and thought. The Terror would have horrified him. The observation is prosaic, but it makes the notion that Rousseauean ideology was the decisive factor, or even a deciding factor, in the violence of 1793–4 seem very unsatisfying. It is worth considering the apparent dearth of appeals to him, especially to his political theory, in efforts to think through the dilemmas and conflicts of 1793–4. The continuity between the Rousseau of the Terror and the Rousseau of Thermidor is conspicuous. Finally, a reading of the issue of violence in the Social Contract allows us to highlight grounds for a Rousseauean critique of the Terror as the symptom of a degenerative republic in the throes of disestablishment. In spite of tremendous ambiguity in Rousseau’s essay – and passages that might very well have been spoken by Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon – there remains sufficient ammunition to attack the dangers of perverted democracy. Such perversion is the inherent, structural risk in a polity generated, oriented and led by the people that it secures and cultivates. Indeed Rousseau develops an impressive diagnosis of the relation between democracy and violence, itemizing the various ways that, in so many words, the corruption of the best is the worst. The moral qualities that prevent the lawgiver from becoming a tyrant are rare. The people, paralyzed by ‘public panic’, hunger for masters who pass ‘destructive laws’. Great numbers of executions demonstrate the ‘weakness’ of the government. ‘Despotism and anarchy’ result when the prince (or government or executive) takes over the legislative function or substitutes itself for the sovereign. Democracy is constitutively unstable, and large populations and territories end up being governed by despotisms and tyrannies. The government grows afraid of the people in whose name it governs. The boundaries between legitimacy and factional sedition become blurred and new tyrants set themselves up above the law and above the people. Recent history provides adequate evidence for the lasting relevance of Rousseau’s concerns.


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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Cf. ibid., 1:217 and 3:iii–iv; and Taine, 1876, 202. Louis Mortimer-Ternaux (1862–81, 4:345n) wrote in his magisterial study of the Terror that ‘Robespierre and his followers were [ . . . ] very fervent disciples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.’ Lord Acton said that Rousseau was Robespierre’s ‘master’ (Acton, 1910, 279). Daniel Mornet (1933, 355) later observed that Rousseau’s ‘very optimism, that naive confidence in the good will of men’ was a more general ‘illusion’ that could be found in all times. Edgar Quinet (1845, 63–4) made the incisive comment that Joseph de Maistre pursued a ‘terrorism of the Church’ that amounted to ‘Robespierre without Rousseau, the means without the ends’. Those familiar with Ernst Kantorowicz’s (1957) classic work on medieval political theology and the ‘king’s two bodies’ will see the baseline here as self-evident. The medieval notion of the church’s ‘mystical body’ was a template for earthly sovereignty. When particular kings died, kingship as a transcendental presence nevertheless endured, as in the phrase, ‘The king is dead, long live the king’. Such a model, involving the incarnation of the social body in the king’s person, remained operative in 1789. The issue points back to Max Weber’s definition (1946, 78) of a state as ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. Gazette nationale, ou Le Moniteur universel 192 (11 July 1793); 108 (7 January 1794); 234 (13 May 1794); 324 (11 August 1794); 338 (25 August 1794); 13 (4 October 1794). Le Moniteur 44 (4 November 1793); 234 (13 May 1794); 338 (25 August 1794); 24 (15 October 1794). Le Moniteur 39 (30 October 1793); 197 (6 April 1794); 247 (26 May 1794); 259 (7 June 1794); 312 (30 July 1794); 20 (11 October 1794). Le Moniteur 223 (11 August 1793); 258 (15 September 1793); 278 (5 October 1793); 97 (27 December 1793); 116 (15 January 1794); 255 (3 June 1794); 12 (3 October 1794); 19 (10 October 1794); 20 (11 October 1794); 39 (30 October 1794). Le Moniteur 33 (24 October 1793); 48 (8 November 1793); 112 (11 January 1794). Le Moniteur 8 (29 September 1794); 8 bis. (29 September 1794); 12 (3 October 1794); 19 (10 October 1794); 20 (11 October 1794). Le Moniteur 207 (16 April 1794).

Chapter 4

Arbitrariness and Freedom: Hegel on Rousseau and Revolution Angelica Nuzzo

Introduction In a remark to Philosophy of Right (1821), §258, introducing the structure of the state as the highest dimension of ethical life, Hegel turns to Rousseau. While stressing Rousseau’s ‘merit’ in establishing the ‘principle’ of the state in the rationality of the will, Hegel’s judgement entails a puzzling criticism that misses Rousseau’s point. On Hegel’s view, the flaw of his theory consists in conceiving of ‘the will only in the determinate form of the individual will’. For, in Hegel’s rendering of Rousseau’s position, the ‘universal will’ is only the will as made up of many individuals (Hegel, 1968, R §258 Anm.). This judgement has been variously regarded as unfair, plainly wrong or even ‘outrageous’.1 It seems to covey Hegel’s misunderstanding of the doctrine of the Social Contract. After all, Rousseau’s main point is to establish the structure of a truly ‘general will’ (volonté générale) as the instituting principle of the state. This he radically distinguishes both from the aggregate which is the ‘will of all’ (volonté de tous) and from the private will of the individual. Nothing seems farther from Rousseau’s intention than the outright identification of the general with the individual will suggested by Hegel. In the Jena Philosophy of Spirit of 1805–6, and then in the chapter on ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and finally in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History Hegel offers yet another appraisal of Rousseau’s philosophy. He sees him, this time, as the spiritual father of the French Revolution in a sense, however, quite different from the one given to that paternity by the French Jacobins.2 Hegel considers the 1789 revolution and the ensuing Terror as the direct political consequence of Rousseau’s notion of the absolute freedom of a will that being merely individual is also entirely arbitrary. In this framework, the development of the revolution from the constitutionalism of the National Assembly of 1789 to the Terror of the Jacobin dictatorship of 1793 is viewed as the necessary political and

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historical implication of Rousseau’s principle. The claim that the French Revolution – and the Jacobin movement in particular – was inspired by Rousseau and, more generally, was the product of the French Enlightenment is not new and has been repeated (or alternatively refuted) from early on in different versions. What is distinctive, however, in Hegel’s judgement is the claim that given Rousseau’s philosophical premises the revolution is a necessary historical consequence – a consequence by no means avoidable. The avoidable mistake is philosophical and lies on Rousseau’s side, not on the side of the revolution (as Burke, for example, suggests). The aim of this article is to answer some questions raised by Hegel’s aforementioned two judgements on Rousseau. Why does Hegel view Rousseau as defending a merely individual conception of the will when he so forcefully upholds the universality of the general will? How does this judgement relate to the claim that the revolution is the direct and necessary political consequence of Rousseau’s theory – or what is it exactly in Rousseau’s conception of the will that is deemed responsible for the revolution? I examine first the argument of the Phenomenology and then turn to the Philosophy of Right. I argue that Hegel’s critique is animated by the recognition of the common project of reducing the impact of the will’s arbitrariness within the state. It is precisely on the basis of its unresolved arbitrariness that Rousseau’s general will appears to Hegel only individual. For Hegel the French Revolution is the historical manifestation of the arbitrariness that Rousseau’s general will is unable to master. I suggest that Hegel’s own solution of the problem lies in the concept of ‘civil society’. As Hegel displaces the arbitrariness of Rousseau’s general will from the state to civil society he overcomes the risk of the state’s revolutionary collapse. In fact, as Hegel’s political model corrects the revolutionary implications of Rousseau’s state, it proposes itself as the basis of a new dialectical relation between philosophy and revolution. It will be Marx’s task to bring this connection to light, as civil society becomes the stage of the revolutionary tensions of the new century. In what follows, I read Rousseau through Hegel. Ultimately, my claim is that Rousseau’s problem is Hegel’s problem. The French Revolution divides them – but revolution, as an always-present possibility and an always-resurging risk offers, again, the common ground for their reflection.

Rousseau’s Legacy: The Phenomenology of Revolution In the Phenomenology chapter ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ Hegel connects in one dramatic narrative the Social Contract and the French Revolution.3 He

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traces spirit’s ‘absolute freedom’ back to the Enlightenment’s notion of ‘utility’, which expresses consciousness’ relation to the world: anything has meaning only insofar as it serves one’s purposes. In the world of utility, spirit gains its ‘absolute freedom’ as ‘universal subject’. ‘The world is for it absolutely its will, and this is universal will’. Such will is not an ineffectual abstraction. It is ‘real universal will’ as the ‘will of all individuals as such’ (Hegel, 1986, 3, 432, my italics). This is Hegel’s rendering of Rousseau’s ‘general will’: to constitute itself as real the general will must be the ‘will of all’ individuals. This is the answer to the problem of the Social Contract: to bring together what ‘right sanctions’ with what ‘is prescribed by interest, so that justice and utility do not find themselves at odds with one another’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book 1, opening). The problem of the general will has its root in the difficulty of reconciling the universality of an action in which ‘what appears to be done by the whole is the direct and conscious deed of each’ (Hegel, 1986, 3, 433) with a utility that can only be the aggregate of particular contingent utilities. Rousseau’s task sounded famously: ‘Find a form of association which defends and protects with all common forces the person and goods of each associate, and by means of which each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book 1, chapter 6). For Hegel, the revolution brings to light the tragic outcome of this claim. It shows that the general will fails to reconcile the demands of freedom with those of utility; and that instead of rendering the individual free the sovereignty of the general will achieves only the tyrannical repression of all individuality. Rousseau’s ‘indivisible’ sovereignty (ibid., Book II, chapter 2) triumphs on the scene of world history. As Hegel announces: The undivided substance of absolute freedom ascends the throne of the world’ and no power can resist it. For within such substance all inner articulation is abolished. The old asset of the ancien régime crumbles as the reconstitution of the Estates Generals into the National Assembly abolishes the old corporative distinctions. The only form of subsistence is the absolute substance of the general will. Nothing else subsists as particular: ‘negativity has permeated all its moments’. (Hegel, 1986, 3, 433) The absolute character of this freedom is the dissolving work of negativity aimed at all particularity. It follows that individual consciousness can be realized only to the extent that ‘its end is the universal end, its language is the universal law’, its work is ‘a work of the whole’ (ibid.) – a work that remains universal and never reaches particularization. Although all particularity of


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intention and interest is eliminated so that all action is ‘state action’, the only real action remains individual. An ineffectual abstraction dooms the general will, which effects ‘no positive deed’ (ibid., 434). For a positive deed would mark a permanent ‘difference’ in the whole and constitute an element of resisting ‘otherness’. The whole would be divided into powers, into different branches of government, into particular spheres of interests. In this case, however, ‘universal freedom’ would end up embracing particularity and the general will ‘would cease to be truly universal’ (ibid., 435). Rousseau’s idea of direct democracy pushes the revolution away from Sieyes’ representative model as well as from the English solution of a mixed constitution. His notion of equality, on the other hand, remains abstract as it simply cancels all differences. Thus, the universal self-consciousness cannot ‘be tricked’ by the promises of representation or by the illusion of obeying a law made only by a part and not by the whole. ‘The general will cannot be represented by anything but itself’ (ibid., see Rousseau, 1997e, Book II, chapters 1 and 4) declares Rousseau. The claim of absolute freedom is the uncompromising conviction that the general will can be real only by willing the universal. Yet reality is on the side of the individual. We have come to the transition from the National Assembly of 1789 to the Jacobin dictatorship of 1793. In order to act, the universal will must put ‘the one of individuality’ in charge of the whole. This is the extreme contradiction of Rousseau’s general will – the contradiction that brings it down to utter tyranny and reduces government to a faction. Following its own dialectic, the general will has become the one of individuality. A faction stands now opposed to the ineffectual and powerless general will. In this way, however, absolute freedom can produce no positive deed. ‘It is merely the fury of destruction’ (Hegel, 1986, 3, 435–6, my italics). Rousseau’s un-dialectical attempt to set the universality of the will apart from the individual results in the non-negotiable opposition between ‘the simple, inflexible, and cold universality, and [ . . . ] the discrete, absolutely hard rigidity and self-willed atomism of actual self-consciousness’. The relation between these two sides is ‘the entirely unmediated pure negation’, the negation of the individual’s existence – its death. Rousseau’s objective is overturned. Far from being free and protected in the whole (obeying ‘only himself’; Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 6), the individual is liquidated by it. This happens not only theoretically, in an equality in which all difference is erased, but also existentially. ‘The sole work and deed of universal freedom is death’ (Hegel, 1986, 3, 436). What is it exactly that precipitates the revolution into the Terror? Or: What has gone wrong in Rousseau’s theory of the general will? For Hegel,

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the chain of events set in motion by the Enlightenment is neither morally nor politically ‘wrong’. It is a historical necessity. It is the un-dialectical refusal to recognize the legitimacy and the power of the individual that undermines the universality of Rousseau’s general will. For, set up against the individual, the universal remains abstract, and holding on to a negative notion of equality, it is structurally unable to master the arbitrariness proper to the individual will. The sovereign universal can erase all individuality – its only action is indeed to bring death by guillotine – but it cannot eliminate the contingency and arbitrariness that eventually penetrates the general will. In destroying all individuality, absolute freedom proves the sheer arbitrariness of its universal action and becomes a mere particular, the arbitrary power of a faction. ‘Government,’ observes Hegel, is called that faction that happens to be the ‘victorious faction’. In this triumph of sheer contingency, concludes Hegel dialectically, ‘lies the immediate necessity of its overthrow’ (ibid., 437, my italics).

Universal and Individual Will In the 1805–6 Realphilosophie, Hegel shares with Rousseau the typically modern problem of the origin of the state.4 The issue is how to make citizens of atomic individuals; how to bring individuals to recognize a common and really communal purpose above and beyond self-interest. Hegel, however, rejects the solution proposed by the natural right tradition and the notion of a social compact. Echoing the fragment on the Verfassung Deutschland and the problem posed by the fact that contemporary Germany is not a ‘state’, Hegel observes that states can only be established by ‘the noble force of great men’ (Schmidt, 1998, 18). Only force can produce the organic unity of the state; only the activity of a ‘great man’ can bridge the gap that separates the private individual from the political community. Theseus is the figure back to which Hegel traces the origin of the state in a sort of mythical genealogy. His interest, however, is chiefly historical and philosophical. Theseus leads him immediately to the contemporary political scene. ‘In this way Theseus established the Athenian state. And thus, in the French Revolution, a fearful force sustained the state [ . . . ]. This force is not despotism but tyranny, pure horrifying domination. Yet it is necessary and just, insofar as it constitutes and sustains the state as this actual individual ’ (Hegel, 1968, 8, 258, my italics). Hegel’s Theseus resonates with Rousseau’s Legislator). The mythical Theseus is readily replaced by the French Revolution. The revolution is invested with the world-historical task of converting the


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amorphous feudal aggregate of the ancien régime into the first democratic republic of modernity – into the first modern nation state. Like the work of Theseus, the revolutionary tyranny expresses the work of individuality. The unity of the nation state does not arise from the abstraction of a general will but from the subversive work of individuality – or, in the appraisal of the Phenomenology, from the general will’s giving in to the individuality that it attempts to violently wipe out. On Hegel’s view, tyranny is necessary and even ‘just’ in its historical necessity because it is functional to the institution of the modern state. Robespierre is overthrown by force because ‘his power has left him, because necessity has left him’ (ibid., 2, 260). Thus, in these early years, for Hegel the French Revolution is both the political actualization of Rousseau’s philosophical principle and the historical event that institutes the first democratic republic of modernity and the first nation state in world history. The necessity of the French Revolution is the necessity of a new beginning, the historical necessity of the institution of the modern nation state that, for Hegel, is the sole subject and agent of world history. Rousseau’s principle, although philosophically mistaken, reveals here its great value. In the 1821 Philosophy of Right Hegel replaces the genealogical issue of the origin of the state with the imminent, systematic deduction of its ‘principle’ within a dialectical process that leads from abstract right to morality to ethical life. In this systematic progression, the state is the culmination of the sphere of ethical life. The state results from a development that starts from the natural unity of the family and moves on through the sphere of the economic activity of the individuals that Hegel calls ‘civil society’. Internally articulated in Constitutional Law and International Law, the sphere of the state is sealed by world history. Rejecting the search for the ‘historical origin of the state in general or rather of each particular state’ as a merely contingent issue, Hegel presents the different, philosophical task at hand as that of finding the ‘concept’ of the state. In regard to this philosophical issue Hegel credits Rousseau for having put forward ‘the will as the principle of the state’ (ibid., R §258 Anm.; see Neuhouser, 1993), yet he criticizes him for the type of will that he takes as fulfilling this function. Hegel introduces the state as the ‘actuality of the ethical idea’ and the realization of ‘substantial freedom’. The actuality and rationality of the political institutions is Hegel’s starting point, while the will is the principle through which the political unity is brought to consciousness. The state does not arise from an act of the will; it is rather the will that becomes ethical by implementing the laws of the state and by carrying on an ethical life. The ethical spirit is the ‘substantial will, manifest and clear to itself, which

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thinks and knows itself and implements what it knows in so far as it knows it’ (Hegel, 1968, R §258). The substantial will is the interaction of two principles: the concrete universality of Sitte or mores and the self-consciousness of the individual. While Rousseau recognizes the former, he does not do justice to the latter, at least to the extent that the individual still claims an independency of its own. He suggests that the most important of all laws ‘is not engraved on marble or bronze, but in the hearts of citizens’. Such law is ‘mores’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book II, chapter 7). While Hegel fully agrees with this point, Rousseau’s conception of the general will obliterates the fact that those customs can only be implemented by the activity of individuals. On Hegel’s view, if the state is the realm in which the will becomes real in its free ‘universality’, such universality is not the starting point – a starting point established by banning the interests and the particularity of the individual, who is then ‘forced’, as it were, into the dimension of a communal will. The state is rather the result of a process in which individuality itself is ‘raised’ (Hegel, 1968, R §259) to its universality or ‘educated’ to the universal in its particularity (ibid., R §187). In the modern world the accidental particularity of the individual can neither be negated nor set aside; in order to make of the bourgeois a citoyen, the accidental particularity of the individual should be justified, accommodated or mediated. Otherwise, the ‘general will’ falls inexorably back into the ‘will of all’. As we shall see, crucial to this process of education and integration is the activity proper to the sphere of civil society. From the outset, the distinctive function of the state is not to negate the individuality of the will but to mediate and thereby overcome its arbitrariness. The individual will that operates and exists in the state as substantial will is the will ‘manifest and clear to itself’ (ibid., R §258), the will that knows and acts according to the lived universality of the ethical customs so that its ‘highest duty is to be member of the state’. To be citoyen is neither one of the many possible volitions of the individual nor the product of a merely arbitrary choice (ibid., R §259, Anm.). It is both the individual’s highest ethical duty and the necessity that first grants the individual a selfconscious and free individuality. This may indeed sound like a Rousseauian objective. As citizen the individual does not cease to be moved by particular and private volitions. Her will, however, ceases to be arbitrary and embraces the constitutive necessity of the highest ethical duty: ‘it is the determination of the individual to conduct a universal life’ (ibid.). Only under this condition is the individual free in a substantial ethical sense. Only in the state is the pursuit of subjective ends compatible (and one) with the willing of the universal or with the universal will. In sum, while for Rousseau the state is a


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universal indivisible unity because it is instituted by the general will, for Hegel the will becomes universal because in its particularity it embraces the ethical life of the state. The grounding relation between the will and the political institutions or the starting point of the constitution of the state is the opposite for Hegel and Rousseau. For Hegel, Rousseau’s ‘general will’ has the merit of attempting to overcome the utilitarian conceptions that base the state on the private interests of its subjects. The state is dissolved if it is reduced to an aggregate of individuals that holds together only contingently on the basis of the common interests of the moment. And yet, in the end, Rousseau’s general will does not deliver on its promise. His position is ultimately indistinguishable from the individualist identification of state and civil society and the necessity of the political bond is undermined by the arbitrariness that institutes it. As a consequence, Rousseau’s theory ushers in the ‘most terrible and drastic event’ in world-history, namely, the French Revolution. In his attempt to eliminate the dominance of particularity and yet to propose a new dimension in which the individual can find her true freedom, Rousseau chooses the radical – and highly un-dialectical – path which eventually dooms his entire project leading him to the opposite result of establishing the tyranny of abstract individuality. To reach the universal of the state the individual must be negated in her distinctive subjective particularity and transformed into the general will. From this, however, it follows that the general will is either the unreal, pure abstract promise of an equality in which all individuality and difference is erased – and in this case, on Hegel’s view, it simply expresses that which all individuals have in common, it is merely the ‘Gemeinschaftliches’ among them. Or the general will is nothing but the still deeply contingent aggregate of the ‘will of all’. In both cases the result is the same. As effective political principle, the general will is the purely abstract, arbitrary and negative work of individuality. A clear sign that this is the case is the fact that Rousseau’s political unity is held together by the juridical relation of a ‘contract, which is accordingly based on the individuals’ arbitrary will and opinions, and on their express consent given at their own discretion’ (ibid.; on Rousseau’s peculiar contractualism see Ripstein, 1992, 61–2). Hegel’s point here is not only that a contractual bond, being an arbitrary act of the will only establishes arbitrary relations among individuals. The further claim is that the general will needs to be consecrated by a contractual relation because its unity is the merely accidental aggregate of individual wills. In other words, (1) no social contract can produce the organic universality of the state, and, (2) if an association of individuals needs to be formalized by a contract this is a clear

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sign that such association is not a truly universal and necessary unity but is still dominated by the arbitrary will of individuals or factions. On Hegel’s account, such associations do not belong to the realm of the state but to civil society.

The Arbitrariness of the Will: Rousseau’s Revolution and Hegel’s Civil Society Hegel defines right as the ‘Dasein of the free will’ (Hegel, 1968, R §29).5 Yet he criticizes the tradition culminating with Rousseau and Kant that explains right in terms of the will – as a voluntary ‘limitation’ of the individual will (ibid., R §29 Anm).6 Hegel rejects the attempts to legitimate right in terms of a will construed as merely arbitrary will (Wille as Willkür). Insofar as they view the will as sheer Willkür, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte and the French Revolution offer examples of the failure of deriving the juridical and political institutions and norms necessary for the actualization of freedom from a will that remains arbitrary. By contrast, Hegel’s aim is to overcome the arbitrariness of Willkür in a will that is objectively and substantially free. This is, however, a will that presupposes and requires the state and its institutions as the basis of freedom. While the pursuit of the ‘general will’ may bring Rousseau’s project close to Hegel’s, its realization remains, on Hegel’s view, trapped in the inescapably individualistic structure of the ‘will of all’ because Rousseau’s systematic starting point is Willkür. But what constitutes the arbitrariness of the will? With regard to its form the will is the first, abstract manifestation of subjective freedom. In its selfreflection, the will is independent of and ‘stands above its content, that is, its various drives’ and the many different ways in which these drives are actualized and satisfied. And yet, since volition in order to become actual must be volition of a content, the will is also ‘tied to this content’. This, however, is not taken in the specificity of ‘this or that content’ but as content in general, as the possibility of one. The will is the capacity of choosing its own content, that is, its own determination (ibid., R §14). This structure defines the ‘freedom of the will’ as ‘Willkür ’, as will in its sheer ‘contingency’. The arbitrariness of the will is due to two dialectically interdependent factors: first, ‘free reflection, the capacity for abstracting from everything’; second, ‘dependence on content and material given either from within or from without’ (ibid., R §15). This structure accounts for the arbitrariness of Rousseau’s general will. But this is also the structure that guides Hegel’s account of the French Revolution in the Phenomenology. The general will can only will a


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general object and, Rousseau insists, ‘it alters its nature when it has a particular object’ or ‘it loses its natural rectitude when it tends toward any individual determinate object’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book II, chapter 4). Although Willkür is universal and negatively free because of its capacity of making abstraction from everything (from all particular content that determines it as individual) in order to actually will it must will a determinate content. But since the will is independent of all material, any content whatsoever can be made to fit its volition. No constraint can restrict the choice of the content because the will is the source of all constraint. Herein lies the arbitrariness of Willkür. Rousseau’s general will, far from being the sanction and the basis of right, can be dangerously used as justification for any content. The Terror draws the extreme consequences out of this claim. The will’s freedom is only negative and abstract freedom – ‘absolute’ indeed in the sense of sheer arbitrariness. Thus, while Rousseau intends to use the concept of the will to remove contingency from the social political realm, the general will, precisely because of its (abstract) universality remains fundamentally arbitrary thereby undermining the necessity of the political unity. On this basis (or, with Hegel, if Willkür is assumed as the ‘foundation’ of right), the results brought to light by the revolution are indeed unavoidable (Hegel, 1968, R §29; see Ripstein, 1994, 456).

Rousseau: Differing from the General Will Discussing the concept of sovereignty that results from the social compact, Rousseau presents the asymmetrical relationship between ‘the sovereign’ and ‘the private individuals who make it up’. The asymmetry is due to the arbitrariness of the will on which the relation is based. Since the sovereign power is constituted by the individuals that endorse the common perspective of the general will, ‘it has no need to offer a guarantee to its subjects, since it is impossible for a body to want to harm all of its members’. The point, however, is ‘that the same thing cannot be said of the subjects in relation to the sovereign’. In this case the sovereign needs additional guarantees of ‘their fidelity’ besides the ‘common interest’. It is here that the element of arbitrariness that menaces the general will comes to the fore so that the resurging threat of the subjects’ individuality needs to be put under control. ‘Each individual can, as a man, have a private will contrary to and different from the general will that he has as a citizen. His private interest can speak to him in an entirely different manner than the common interest’. This is

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indeed the basis for Rousseau’s distinction between the general will and the ‘will of all’. Although not as the mere sum of private interests, the general will still expresses that which all the individuals have in common – a shared perspective or a common volition. Accordingly, it cannot accommodate that in which the individual wills differ. This opens a gulf between the two that signals the arbitrariness of the bond based on the act of the general will. What remains outside of the general will is the individual’s ‘absolute and naturally independent existence’ – the same existence that, on Hegel’s account of the Terror, is disposed of by state-enforced repression. As we shall see, Hegel’s civil society is meant to address and accommodate (instead of repress) the resurging private interest of the individuals in its divergence from the general will. In Rousseau’s model, by contrast, the fact that private and general will do (logically as well as existentially) differ constitutes an element of instability for the social bond: the general will remains an ideal construct that in the moment of acquiring reality is immediately (and dangerously) threatened by the possibility of reverting to the will of all. The possibility that rights and duties do not correspond may give raise to ‘an injustice whose growth’, Rousseau recognizes, ‘would bring about the ruin of the body politic’ – hence the need for the additional guarantees of loyalty required by the sovereign or the necessity of the tacit engagement clause implicitly entailed in the social compact lest it be ‘an empty formula’: ‘that whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body. This means merely that he will be forced to be free’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 7, my italics). The tacit engagement clause expresses the split within the individual whereby private subjectivity and public universality remain unreconciled. Coercion on the ground of freedom is a necessary choice of the individual precisely because she knows that divergence from the general will is always a possibility.7 But this very possibility sanctions, at the same time, the arbitrariness of the political bond. The disconnect between private and general will carries over to the beginning of Social Contract, Book II, where Rousseau establishes the inalienable character of sovereignty. Only the general will can work for the purpose for which it was instituted, that is, the ‘common good’. No representative can replace it. The sovereign ‘cannot be represented by anything but itself’. While private interests are many and opposed to one another, ‘it is what these different interests have in common that forms the social bond, and, were there no point of agreement among these interests, no society could exist’. Given, however, that what constitutes the social bond is the organic commonality or the shared perspective of the general will, the problem is yet again what to do with that in which the private interests differ from the general


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will.8 Although Rousseau seems to sidestep the problem and concentrate on the necessity and sufficiency of some agreement as the condition for the social bond (whereby at stake is not a common interest but the decision to endorse a common perspective for deliberation), he is aware of the contingency and arbitrariness that undermines such agreement precisely because of the persisting difference between general and private will. He recognizes that ‘while it is not impossible for a private will to be in accord on some point with the general will, it is impossible at least for this accord to be durable and constant ’. Rousseau recognizes that ‘chance’ (ibid., Book II, chapter 1, my italics) presides on the accord between individual and general will rendering the social bond a union that remains fundamentally arbitrary and accidental. In addressing the question of ‘whether the general will can err’, Rousseau returns to this issue: ‘There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will. The latter considers only the general interest, whereas the former considers private interest and is merely the sum of private wills’. And yet, the general interest must result from the arithmetic process of canceling out ‘the pluses and minuses’ among the private wills so that ‘what remains as the sum of the differences is the general will’. This is Rousseau’s rationalization of the contingency of the political bond in which differences need to be accommodated. Difference plays a role on two levels. At stake is first the private, contingent difference that separates the many individual interests – to accommodate this difference is occasionally possible and is the problem of the ‘will of all’. But there is also the structural, unavoidable difference that separates the private will from the general will – such difference cannot be accommodated but only overcome by the arbitrary decision of the private will that makes itself general. Even this act, however, does not guarantee the permanent coincidence between the individual and the universal – the need for the tacit engagement clause is a clear sign thereof. The point of Rousseau’s arithmetic explanation seems to be that while in the ‘will of all’ private disagreements must cancel each other out, for action is possible only if some agreement is reached, in the case of the general will differences do not need to disappear (because in fact they don’t) but be only rendered ineffectual. Individuals must agree that despite all private divergence they can still agree about how to resolve their disagreements (see Ripstein, 1992, 55). In the general will, individual differences are maintained but not allowed to become grounds for decision. On Hegel’s view, this is the point of Rousseau’s construction that is still at the mercy of pure arbitrariness. For this is precisely what Willkür does: it proves its freedom by making abstraction from all determinate content and simply willing the universal. Ultimately, however, that private differences do

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not become the grounds of public decisions depends on the individual will and on this will only. Rousseau recognizes that if some particular interest is allowed to dominate and consolidate itself into associations capable of driving the decisions of the whole, this leads to factions. In this case, the general will reverts to a private opinion and the political union is dissolved. Thus, Rousseau’s recommendation is that ‘there should be no partial society in the state’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book II, chapter 3). In fact, there is nothing that can prevent difference from acquiring a form of existence and become the ground of private decisions taken in the name of the whole. For Hegel the French Revolution is the best proof thereof. Based on this diagnosis, his solution of the problem is to accommodate that resurging difference and to find a legitimate place for associations and ‘partial societies’ of private interests not within the state – for here Rousseau is right, this would only dissolve the political unity – but within ‘civil society’.

Arbitrariness in Hegel’s Civil Society In the Philosophy of Right Hegel’s solution to the problem of arbitrariness in the social and political world is articulated in two parts. First, as argued above, he overturns Rousseau’s position grounding the universality and freedom of the will in the substantial universality of the institutions of the state. Granting the distinction between the organic unity of the ‘general will’ and the aggregate of individuals that is the ‘will of all’, their separation remains arbitrary if, as in Rousseau, the ultimate decision of becoming ‘general’ (or ‘ethical’) is left to Willkür. Hegel’s starting point by contrast is the systematic and historical necessity of the political institutions. In order to have the kind of volitions proper to Rousseau’s general will the state must be presupposed along with the entire structure and inner articulation of ethical life. As we have seen, for Hegel the content of the ethical will is not ethical because it is willed by a general will. As systematic result of the dialectic development of objective spirit and as historical product of the development of the modern world, the ethical content is objectively actual and necessary independently of the will. It is rather by willing the universal content and by fulfilling the ethical duty of being a member of the state that the will makes itself universal and free. Second, Hegel construes the dialectical path that allows individuality to be mediated – formed and educated – to the universality and freedom of ethical life. Unlike Rousseau, Hegel conceives of objective spirit as a process in which the will’s individuality and universality do not remain separated by


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an arbitrary choice. Crucial to this process is the introduction of the structure of ‘civil society’ and its fundamental distinction from the ‘state’. As we have seen, in the early Jena years (1805–7) Hegel sees the French Revolution as the world-historical upheaval that expresses the exploding force of the will’s arbitrariness and individuality but also gives birth to the first modern nation state in world history. Starting from 1818–19 Hegel assigns to ‘civil society’ the function of absorbing, justifying and giving free actuality to the will’s individuality and arbitrariness, thereby characterizing the social and political world proper to modernity. In structuring this sphere of ethical life, Hegel does not look at Rousseau but at the Scottish political economists – at Adam Smith in particular (see Nuzzo, 2009). Civil society is the sphere of the market and of the economic activity of individuals who are placed in a net of social interactions and are guided by utilitarian interests and aims. We have here the justification and legitimization of those aspects of individuality and arbitrariness that haunt the actual democratic functioning of a society based on Rousseau’s general will because they can neither be accommodated within it nor can they be eliminated in their difference from the general will.9 Hegel’s point is that the sphere of civil society is systematically distinct from the state and its relations should not be confused with political relations – to reduce the state to civil society amounts, for Hegel as for Rousseau, to dissolving the political unity. And yet, civil society with its self-interested individualism constitutes a necessary moment of ethical life, the necessary condition for the individual to become citoyen or a member of the state capable of a truly universal will. On Hegel’s view, in the modern world the arbitrariness of the individual will cannot be suppressed but must find a legitimate sphere within ethical life. Individuality needs to be given free rein in order to be formed and educated to the universality of ethical life required by the higher commitments proper to the state. This is indeed the lesson that the French Revolution has taught with regard to Rousseau’s ideas (suggestions are in Schmidt, 1998, 26). Since the arbitrariness of the individual will cannot be cancelled, if it is not given an independent and legitimate sphere of activity, it emerges at the level of the state disintegrating the ethical whole. In this sense Rousseau’s general will is still only individual. Terror – or tyranny – becomes then an unavoidable political consequence. Hegel introduces the sphere of ‘civil society’ by describing the action that takes place within it as the convergence of two principles. On the one hand, the agent is a particular, ‘concrete person’, characterized by a totality of needs, natural feelings and arbitrary volitions. This person, observes Hegel, stands in relation to other particular individuals and it is only through these

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others that she is able to fulfill her volitions and satisfy her needs. This interaction is the basis of the second principle of civil society, namely, the ‘universality’ that characterizes the action mediated by the reciprocity in which the individuals are placed (Hegel, 1968, R §182). Although individual ends are ‘selfish’, based on merely personal interests and motivations, they are also social and inter-subjectively mediated for two reasons. First, individual ends are conditioned by the relations in which they stand within the universal context of reciprocal interaction because this context alone allows for those ends to be realized. Subsistence, welfare and rights of the individual are interwoven with and dependent on the subsistence, welfare and rights of all (ibid., 183). The universality of this sphere is neither the full-fledged universality of the state in which individuality is finally integrated nor is it the abstract yet communal universality of Rousseau’s general will from which individuality is excluded. As the universality of the intersubjective context in which individual interests have priority and are given free rein, it is perhaps closer to Rousseau’s ‘will of all’. But Hegel offers a second reason for the social or ‘universal’ character of individual action and for the mutual dependence that binds individuals to each other in this sphere. Here Hegel’s argument comes significantly close to Smith’s peculiar ‘impartial spectator’10 position. His point is that within the sphere of civil society individual selfish motivations are acted upon because they display a reflective universality that is due to their belonging to an individual only through their belonging to any other person. Although the individual is a ‘concrete person’, as a citizen of civil society she is also an abstract universal; she is one of the many equal individuals. Her motivations are legitimate motivations in their selfish character because they are the selfish motivations of all other individuals. In order to act as a citizen of this sphere, the individual is required to recognize such double character of her volitions – the selfish motivation must be recognized as a shared selfish motivation. ‘Citizens’ of civil society are ‘private persons’ who pursue individual ends and actions only by way of recognizing the shared character of their individual volitions and interests, that is, by projecting their motivations within the standpoint of every other member of this sphere – recognizing their own motives in the others’ and the others’ in their own. Individual ends remain selfish and proper to the individual: they are not willed because of benevolence or because of the broader public good, as is the case within the higher unity of the state; nor are they required to renounce their particularity and interest-based nature to fit the requirements of Rousseau’s ‘general will’ or to pass the universalizability test of Kant’s categorical imperative.


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And yet, those individual ends are legitimately proper to the individual as a member of civil society if and only if they can be viewed, recognized and endorsed from and by the standpoint of all others. Such projection implies the equality of all individuals as well as the reciprocity and reflexivity of our relations to them. Unlike Rousseau’s equality, which implies the abstraction from individual differences, the equality of Hegel’s civil society is the recognition that individual difference is proper to all private persons. Civil society displays the process in which ‘subjectivity is educated in its particularity’ (ibid., 187). The universalization of the individual that Hegel calls ‘Bildung ’ (ibid, R §187 and Remark; also §§197, 209 Remark) – education and culture – and whose function is to form the fully integrated member of the political community, begins precisely in this sphere. Education and culture along with ‘work’ are for Hegel the beginning of ethical ‘freedom’. In this way, civil society is Hegel’s final answer to and correction of Rousseau’s problem of the general will. In civil society, in the realm of the self-interested economic activity of the individuals, the arbitrariness of the will finds its justification and is educated to the higher universal dimension of the state. While the French Revolution shows what happens when the arbitrariness of the will commands the political life under the lofty yet abstract cover of the ‘general will’, civil society offers a tamed and functionalized version of the activity of individuality without the political institutions of the state. It is perhaps not insignificant that Marx’s later reflections on revolution and its necessity will develop out of a correction of Hegel’s model of civil society.

Notes 1

In the literature, Hegel’s two-faced judgement is generally interpreted by paying attention to only one of its contradictory aspects: for example, see Neuhouser, 1993 for insistence on the positive appraisal of Rousseau; see Ripstein, 1994, 444 for the ‘outrageous’ judgement, and Comay, 2004, 387 for Hegel’s ‘unwarranted savagery against Rousseau’ where Comay insists on Hegel’s criticism of Rousseau’s principle. My claim is that the two aspects of Hegel’s judgement must, instead, be taken and interpreted together. 2 Contemporary appropriations of Rousseau are documented in Wokler, 1998, 42–3. 3 For the historical contextualization of Hegel’s narrative see Harris, 1972–83; d’Hondt, 1986; Comay, 2004; Ritter, 1965; Schmidt, 1998 and Wokler, 1998. 4 For Hegel’s early reading of Rousseau see Fulda and Horstmann, 1991. 5 This is followed by the claim that ‘right is something sacred in general’ (R §30), which echoes Rousseau’s ‘sacred right’ in Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 1.

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7

8

9

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Rousseau and Revolution See Ripstein, 1994 who, however, while stressing Hegel’s distance from Rousseau, does not explain Hegel’s own articulation of the relation between right and will. For a persuasive reading of this passage see Neuhouser, 1993, 380 ff. (388–9 for the ‘capriciousness’ of the will in the political institution). While the difference of the private wills among themselves is the problem of the ‘will of all’, the problem of the general will regards the difference that divides it from the private will. For a different, ‘Hegelianized’ reading of Rousseau on this point, see Neuhouser, 1993, 386, who sees a ‘dialectical’ mediation in Rousseau’s account of individual dependence within the political order; and 393 where the Hegelian distinction between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ freedom is brought to bear on Rousseau’s relation between individual and general will. In my view, by contrast, while such mediation belongs for Hegel to the sphere of civil society and not to the state, Rousseau has not reached a dialectical integration of the individual will within the whole, that is, there is a residual arbitrariness that ultimately condemns even the general will to individuality. I endorse here Darwall’s characterization of Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’ as a standpoint ‘from within’ the other’s moral life (Darwall, 1999, 141 and 147). See also Nuzzo, 2009.

Part Two

Philosophy and Political Change


Chapter 5

Reverse Revolution: The Paradox of Rousseau’s Authorship Fayçal Falaky

Rousseau, Saviour of People Who Never Read Him Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1835) includes a passage where the ambitious Rastignac is left contemplating an unholy offer to get rich from Vautrin, a sort of criminal dandy with whom he happened to share the same boarding house. If Rastignac marries Victorine de Taillefer, Vautrin will get rid of her older brother, the only obstacle between the girl and the family inheritance. Tempted by this diabolic deal, Rastignac confides his dilemma to his friend Bianchon through an allusion to Rousseau. Have you read Rousseau? Yes. Do you recall the passage where he asks what the reader would do if he could become rich by killing some old mandarin in China without stirring from Paris, simply by willing it so? I do. Well? Bah! I am well on to my thirty-third mandarin. (Balzac, 1991, 124) The problem with Rastignac’s reference is that Rousseau never wrote such a thing. The story of the murdered mandarin originates in Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme where he, in turn, refers to a passage taken from a text written by Diderot in 1773, entitled Entretien d’un père avec ses enfants, ou du danger de se mettre au-dessus des lois (Ginzburg, 2001). The fact that this misattribution to Rousseau happens after the explicit question: ‘Have you read Rousseau?’ and to which the answer is another explicit ‘Yes’ means that Balzac was well aware of the lapse, and he was instead making a point on people’s general ignorance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s works. This point is quite explicit in a different novel of La Comédie humaine entitled

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Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau (1837) and where Balzac makes use of the introduction of Birotteau’s character, a lower middle class perfumer during the Restauration, to criticize the Parisian bourgeois’ superficial culture: When he first came to Paris, Cesar had known how to read, write, and cipher, but his education stopped there; his laborious life had kept him from acquiring ideas and knowledge outside the business of perfumery. Mixing wholly with people to whom science and letters were of no importance, and whose information did not go beyond their specialty, having no time to give to higher studies, the perfumer had become a merely practical man. He adopted necessarily the language, blunders, and opinions of the bourgeois of Paris, who admires Moliere, Voltaire, and Rousseau on faith, and buys their books without ever reading them. (Balzac, 2004, 29) Another character of Le Père Goriot, Vautrin, the criminal genius of Balzac’s Human Comedy, declares, only after disparaging the Social Contract, that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is his hero. Referring to himself by his real name, Jacques Collin, Vautrin says, A convict of Collin’s caliber, and here I am, is not such a coward as other men; he is protesting against the monstrous betrayals of the Social Contract, to use the words of Jean-Jacques, whose disciple I am proud to be. In a word, I stand alone against the government, with its pile of courts, policemen and civil budgets, and I get the better of them. (Balzac, 1991, 186) Against the deceptions of the Social Contract yet, Rousseau’s proud pupil Vautrin, in the span of two sentences, reveals or feigns a disconcerting lack of knowledge about his self-avowed hero.1 The figure of Rousseau as a sort of rebel against the abuses of the powerful is here reduced to its basest cliché. As these Balzacian examples demonstrate, Rousseau’s legacy, after the French Revolution, seemed to be in the hands of people who had never read him. Heralded as the father of the revolution, celebrated as the saviour of the masses, Rousseau’s name had become commonplace, but so was the risk of his misinterpretation.

The Revolution Writes Rousseau Writes the Revolution The generation following 1789 saw Rousseau in light of a revolution, which although posthumous, gradually came to be considered the philosopher’s

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magnum opus. But did Rousseau really write the revolution as is suggested by the title of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s 1791 book, De J.-J. Rousseau considéré comme l’un des premiers auteurs de la Révolution? Connecting Rousseau to the events of 1789 was obviously not the philosophers’ choice and can only be explained by the practical need of the revolutionaries to anchor their ideological beliefs on a philosophical foundation. In this sense, choosing Rousseau over other philosophers also meant preferring one current of the Enlightenment over another. Unlike the materialism or the physical rationalism of other contemporary philosophers, Rousseau’s philosophical focus on the inner sentiment provided a spiritual energy and the eventuality of a sacred aura to the measures taken under the revolution. In this sense, linking Rousseau’s name to the events following 1789 up until Thermidor was also a means of filling the spiritual vacuum left by the dethroned God of the Catholic edifice. Placing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen under the auspices of a supreme being was a deferential reference to the author of the Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard and a way to reorient the orphaned faith of the people into a divinized legislation.2 As its prophet, Rousseau stood as the figure who could grant it the legitimate blessing to succeed. As we shall see, the religious dimension given to the French Revolution has a direct bearing on the anachronistic supposition that Rousseau authored the event. In order for the effect to become the cause, the essential nature of the supposition necessitated a retrocausal argument that went against the rational thought we usually associate with the Enlightenment. In Candide, for example, Voltaire criticizes Leibnitz’s theodicy for using an a priori reasoning in which cause and effect are inversed, and mocks him by having the Leibnizian Dr. Pangloss declare that Since everything was designed for a purpose, everything is necessarily meant to serve the best of all purposes. [ . . . ] noses are designed to hold up eyeglasses, and therefore we have eyeglasses. Legs are obviously meant for wearing shoes, and so we have shoes. Rocks having been designed to be quarried and used for building purposes, the Baron has a singularly beautiful mansion. (Voltaire, 2005, 2) Likewise, La Mettrie’s diatribe against religious inspired essentialism in L’Homme-machine also focuses on its illogical penchant to put effect before cause, Man is a machine so complicated that it is impossible at first to form a clear idea of it, and, consequently, to describe it. This is why all the

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investigations the greatest philosophers have made a priori, that is, by wanting to take flight with the wings of the mind, have been in vain. Only a posteriori, by unraveling the soul as one pulls out the guts of the body, can one, I do not say discover with clarity what the nature of man is, but rather attain the highest degree of probability possible on the subject. (Mettrie, 1994, 30) By asserting that knowledge arises from practical observation, the empiricalmaterialist approach not only refutes the logical applicability of a priori theories but, in so doing, refuses the possibility of a pure moral philosophy that is completely purged of physical experience. The divergence over a priori and a posteriori thought which pitted the philosophes against the Catholic apologists of the eighteenth century had also created a rift between them and Rousseau. The latter’s belief, for example, that language could not have possibly emanated from a historical and social progression of the natural man, and his decision to place its invention in an immeasurable time span shrouded in mystery, imply that the creation of language must have required the presence of a metaphysical force.3 Language is no longer the logical and historical result of human progress and refinement but rather the latter’s inexplicable and fortuitous cause. During the revolution, the Jacobins’ decision to elevate Rousseau to national sainthood and to disparage his old philosophical rivals as vicestricken atheists marked a setback for science and rational empiricism and meant a sudden return to religious and essentialist a priori tropes. It is within this context that we can understand how Rousseau proceeded to write the revolution 11 years after his death. Since the religious dimension of the French Revolution necessitated a structure where the effect could become the cause, it had to embrace a philosophy that could allow such a prospect.

Rousseau, Prophet of the Revolution Despite the dechristianization measures of the French Revolution, people’s faith, as signaled by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’s deference to a Supreme Being, had not withered. If anything, rid of the strictures of the Catholic edifice, it had only doubled in fervour. For once, the people had a reason to believe. The revolution was carried out on their behalf and under the banner of a new and less dogmatic God – indistinguishable from the one worshipped by Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar.

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The new spiritual context required a prophetic figure that could intercede on behalf of the converts, and Rousseau seemed to be the obvious choice. Robespierre raised him as its unique ideologue because unlike the rationalists, the materialists and most of the distinguished philosophes of his century, Rousseau unabashedly believed in a higher power and thus offered an inspiring spiritual dimension to the ideals of the revolution. Edgar Quinet, signalling this univocal outcome, criticized the revolutionaries for losing sight of their original goal and resorting to the same logic they had been combating. As he writes in La Révolution, the revolution was bound to shoot itself in the foot, As soon as the revolutionaries grew tired of waging war against their enemy, that is, the system they inherited from the Middle Ages, and following J.-J. Rousseau’s footsteps, they pursued what they termed philosophisme, atheism, materialism, it was apparent that under these different names, the Revolution had to kill the Revolution. Under this logic, modern spirit as a whole should have ended at the scaffold. (Quinet, 1866, 171) Although its objective was to fight the tyranny of the monarchy and the Church, the revolution ironically brought to life the same authoritarianism it had sought to kill. Faith in the revolution was not just a faith but a zeal fanatically filling the void left by the Catholic Church. Quinet adds: With the word of philosophisme, we see the Girondins sentenced; with naturalism, the Dantonists; with atheism, the Commune of Paris. There was no new form of thought, no boldness of spirit, no conception of modern intelligence that was not condemned in Robespierre’s system, and what is more, through the same name-calling that the ancient religion had used in its excommunications. The curse cast by Catholicism against modern spirit broke out again in Robespierre, blinded by Rousseau. All that which went beyond the bounds of the Savoyard Vicar had to be cut out by the sword. Thus, Leibnitz had to be rooted out as a visionary, Spinoza as an intolerant atheist and a fanatic, Descartes as a builder of systems who troubled the peace of the good people of the countryside; all the German philosophers who destroyed even the idea of the supreme being had to be sacrificed. After Robespierre had thus struck at what he called philosophisme, he took away his own justification for existing. At the end, he came upon Catholicism, as if nothing had changed (ibid., 171–2).4

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The adoration surrounding Rousseau did indeed reach religious and cultish dimensions, and the fact that he was arguably persecuted (or so he believed) by the men in power, be they politicians or philosophes, had, in the eyes of the revolutionaries, given him a Christ-like magnitude. Although the figure of Rousseau was used to replace a deposed God, the contextual structure of the Catholic faith, as Quinet argues, remained intact. Rousseau, like Christ, was glorified in a covenant of persecution and suffering. By placing him on the altar, people were reminded of their own afflictions suffered under the Ancien Régime, and the revolution was seen as both their and Rousseau’s vengeance over the oppressors. In his Lettres sur les Confessions published in 1791, Guingené, a great admirer of Rousseau, starts his preface with the following words: ‘The man of genius is avenged; The French Nation is vindicated in the eyes of Europe. It has erected a statue to the Author of the Social Contract and decreed that his Widow will be provided for at the expense of the State’ (Guingéné, 1791, v–vi). Guingéné then proceeds to compare his literary homage to Rousseau to drops of incense devotedly left at the foot of the author’s statue, ‘at a time when his memory has somehow become sacred’. The religious symbolism surrounding Rousseau’s glory is once again raised by the same Guingéné in La Feuille villageoise, a revolutionary paper founded in Paris in 1790 to spread the ideals of the revolution throughout all the villages of France. In the journal, celebrating the 1794 Fête des victoires and the particular homage given to Rousseau, Guingéné writes, ‘It seemed not like we were honoring the man of genius, the eloquent man, the great man but rather the good man, the apostle of good morals, the benefactor of humanity [ . . . ] All of this had airs of magic and religion’ (cited in Roussel, 1972, 14). As Jean Roussel notes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau en France après la Révolution, the worship of Rousseau did move from the ceremonial to the ritual. As the Jacobins gained more power, it was common to see among the populace, at least for a short period of time, a sort of sacrament to honor the author of the Social Contract. Roussel writes, Among the people and beyond, we witness a sort of mystical recourse to Rousseau, as if there was a need for a “tutelary genius”, an unlikely intercessor during a precarious time between the Frenchmen and the “Supreme Being” or Nature. The Cult of the Martyrs of Liberty had recently given to the adoration of Rousseau a dramatic character, and often added his name to the sacrificial consecration which until then was limited to the “trinity” of Le Peletier, Marat and Chalier. (Ibid.)

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In such an environment, any condemnation of Rousseau was tantamount to sacrilege. In Leçons d’histoire, Volnay whose name, a compound of Ferney and Voltaire, gave away his admiration for the latter describes the religious fervour with which people reacted to criticism of Rousseau in these terms: There is this characteristic difference between Rousseau and Voltaire, considered as chieftains of opinions, that if you attack Voltaire before his partizans, they defend him by reasoning or pleasantry, but without passion, and at most only regard you as a person of bad taste: But if you attack Rousseau before his disciples, you excite in them a religious horror, and they regard you as a monster. (Volney, 1800, 217)5 The divine statute given to Rousseau also forbade any heretical association to his glory. Hence, when in 1791, a decree was passed to move Rousseau’s grave from Ermenonville to the Panthéon, Marat denounced the idea and, in a letter, appealed to René Girardin, Rousseau’s friend and the man responsible for his mortal remains: Girardin, it is you whom a dying Rousseau entrusted with the care of his mortal remains. By putting them between your hands, he knew that they will be under the sacred guard of friendship. Would you cowardly suffer today that they be transported from the peaceful groves of Ermenonville to the lair consecrated to the most notorious traitors of the homeland, to the vilest corruptors of morals, to the most scandalous writers of the century? Why! The ashes of the apostle of truth and of liberty, of the defender of humanity, of the restorer of the sacred rights of nations, will they lie in between the contagious corpses of the apostles of imposture, the apologists of despotism? (Marat, 1908, 217) These apostles of imposture and apologists of despotism are of course Mirabeau and Voltaire whose remains had been translated to the Panthéon that very same year, in 1791. For Marat, it was a sacrilege to associate them in any way with the ‘apostle of truth’. The fervour which had seized upon the French Revolution divinized Rousseau to the point that good citizenship implied a fanatic embrace of his ideas. Blaspheming the author of Émile could not go unnoticed or unpunished. Charles Palissot, whose 1760 play Les Philosophes depicted a Jean-Jacques Rousseau walking on all fours, had thus a hard time justifying, after the revolution, his ancient hostility towards the Genevan

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philosopher. When Palissot asked for a certificat de civisme [civic certificate],6 mainly to protect himself from any accusations, a magistrate of the Paris commune by the name of Chaumette refused to grant him the favour because of Palissot’s reputation as an anti-Rousseauist. Thus, in a speech to the Commune, Chaumette charged Palissot for attempting to defile the revolution’s idol even before the revolution, The same Palissot is the one who, like a venomous caterpillar, attempt to sully the crown of the celebrated Jean-Jacques Rousseau; [ . . . ] Cursed be the monsters who struck Rousseau’s tender heart with the sharp iron of slander! It’s the duty of patriots to avenge the earnest friend of humanity, the angel of light who showed freedom to men and could raise in them the desire for it. [ . . . ] Consequently, I object to the issuing of a certificate of civism to Palissot; may this act of justice be an expiatory sacrifice to the Manes of the famed and righteous Rousseau, who will always be cherished by all those who possess a good, sensitive and virtuous heart! (Moniteur, 1860, 646) Years later in Mémoire sur la Littérature, Palissot writes that to defend himself from what had become a grave offense, he answered, ‘that Rousseau be a divine man, or even a God (I replied to this oddball), I am far from being opposed to this apotheosis: but I ask you, is it reason enough to sacrifice human victims?’ (cited in Meaume, 1864, 44). Even more than these blasphemies, what seemed to exasperate some of Rousseau’s admirers the most was to see his remains taken to the Pantheon to rest besides those of Mirabeau and Voltaire. Like Marat, an anonymous author of a pamphlet entitled Voyage à Ermenonville argued against the translation of Rousseau’s relics because it was in nature that the author of Émile should be worshipped. Although the author refuses any superstitious or religious trait to such adoration, he does not shy away from moving the censer around: The nations [ . . . ] will come and burn incense far from Ignorance and Superstition. [ . . . ] Romans made Numa a god; Turks turned Mahomet into a prophet; [ . . . ] While not as superstitious, why would we not be as grateful? Why wouldn’t Rousseau be among us an object of national devotion? [ . . . ] He would be as great as Lycurgus or Solon if seen from the same distance; a century passed over his glory will make it shine twice as brightly; he will be greater than them when our government is established on the foundations he laid. (Voyage à Ermenonville, 1794, 17–18)

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In a footnote however, after insisting on the non-religious character of the worship, the author adds, ‘Jean-Jacques will indisputably be the first god among men’ (ibid., 24). The comparison the author makes to Numa, Muhammad, Lycurgus and at a later point to Moses are not fortuitous.7 These names are taken from Rousseau’s Social Contract. This list of mythical legislators which Rousseau sought as examples for his republic, and among which he was elevated during the revolution, lends us to ask questions on the role Rousseau played to bring about the events of 1789. The idea of attributing to Rousseau the authorship of an event that came after him might seem illogical. However, if we consider Rousseau’s own notion of authorship, especially in the political realm, we realize to what extent it conforms to the type of filiation some would have wanted to establish between him and the revolution. The model of Lycurgus which Rousseau uses to describe the perfect legislator in the Social Contract is here significant.

Rousseau’s Pauline Covenant Before his death, the mythical legislator of Sparta destroyed all rhetras, all written laws, since he deemed instead that the virtues and principles of his city had to be embedded in the citizens’ character. The legislator is thus capable of persuading and molding hearts and minds without having recourse to written laws. Only through this education of the heart can the habits of man transform into and conform to the morals, customs and opinion required of the citizen. In this sense, the objective of the legislator is thus to author the invisible. This is what Rousseau means when in the Social Contract he insists on the importance of that fourth and most important of laws, ‘To these three types of laws is added a fourth, the most important of all; which is not engraved on marble or bronze, but in the hearts of the citizens; which is the genuine constitution of the State’ (Rousseau, 1994d, 164). Likewise, when Rousseau talks about the extraordinary function of the legislator, he distinguishes it from that of common rulers, who, to impose their whims, need to engrave their laws in stone, ‘Any man can engrave stone tablets, buy an oracle, pretend to have a secret relationship with some divinity, train a bird to talk in his ear, or find other crude ways to impress the people’ (ibid., 157). While anyone can write laws, the miraculous nature of Rousseau’s legislator dispenses him from such a debased task. We are here in the presence of a political and also religious critique of the act of writing. The notion that the written law kills the

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patriotic spirit, as connoted in Rousseau’s Social Contract, echoes Saint Paul’s assertion that the letter of Christ is ‘written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts’ (Corinthians 2.3:3). Just as Rousseau will wish to distinguish his original kind of contract from that of previous political theorists, Saint-Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians is thought out as the foundation of a new covenant in Christ different from ‘the ministry of death, inscribed in letters of stone’ (ibid.). The new covenant is ‘not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’ (ibid., 3:6–7). In a sense, Rousseau’s Social Contract offers us a Pauline recipe to draw out a new covenant for politics. Although the general will is the common will of the people, its spiritual dimension gives it an a priori function by which it can also form the people. The general will, as invisible voice, is here both cause and effect. Since it is not inscribed, not only does it escape death (the letter kills) but it also allows for a force that is constantly renewable. On that most important fourth law, engraved not on marble, but in the hearts of citizens, Rousseau writes that it is the one which ‘gains fresh force each day; which, when other laws age or die out, revives or replaces them, preserves a people in the spirit of its institution, and imperceptibly substitutes the force of habit for that of authority’ (Rousseau, 1994d, 164). Since unwritten, morals, customs and opinion have the privilege to renew and revive the spirit of the institution, but also to revisit and reform its foundations. By going back in time, these unwritten laws can effectively dissimulate between what is cause and what is effect. A written text such as the Social Contract that offers as objective the supremacy of pneuma, of spirit, might seem like a contradiction, but this contradiction is at least a consistent one in Rousseau’s works. He disparages the arts and the sciences in his first discourse, he encourages the readers of the second discourse, of the Discourse on Inequality to close the scientific books and hear the Book of Nature that is within them (Rousseau, 1990a, 14), and the sole book he prescribes in the course of Émile’s education is Robinson Crusoe (Rousseau, 1979, 184). If Rousseau excuses his own books, it is because they warn us against others. They are a necessary evil. If Rousseau had it his way, he would have fashioned himself as another Lycurgus, burning his rhetras after having written them.

The Effect Becomes the Cause The Social Contract’s fate during the revolution was not to be set in fire. Having appeared in thirty-two editions between 1789 and 1799,8 it was

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among the most, if not the most published book of the revolutionary period. After having little circulation prior to 1789, the Social Contract became what Mornet would term the ‘Bible of the Revolution’.9 This comparison to the Bible is not solely numeric, used to highlight the prodigious number of Social Contract editions published but it lends to a more religious metaphor. Considering that the Bible, a book where spirit dominates over text, is often used as a relic rather than a text, and read accordingly, we are to wonder if a similar approach was accorded to the Social Contract. In the case of Rousseau’s political treatise, can we actually equate publication with reading? In Le Mercure britannique, the ideologue Mallet du Pan writes from his exile in London that he had once heard Marat read the Social Contract to a crowd whose immoderate enthusiasm reflected a dangerous and delirious zeal. He then proceeds to compare the reception of the Social Contract to that of the Koran, This Social Contract which destroys society was a Koran to the affected speech makers of 1789, to the Jacobins of 1790, to the Republicans of 1791, and to the most atrocious madmen. [ . . . ] Through some remarkable oddity, the most isolated of writers, a hapless stranger retired from the world, without a party, without friends in his lifetime and who counted as his enemies the majority of the Paris philosophes, became the prophet of revolutionary France. (Mallet du Pan cited in Roussel, 1972, 77) The comparison to the Koran suggests that the force of the Social Contract was in its symbolic significance rather than in its content and that most people, instead of expounding its theories, bought it more readily for its consecrated and ceremonial nature. In 1795, Sénac de Meilhan declares in Des gouvernements, des moeurs et des conditions en France avant la Révolution that ‘this profound and abstract book is rarely read and understood by a few number of people’ (cited in ibid., 78). Yet, lack of readership does not mean that the Social Contract was not read at all. Besides the many editions of the book that appeared after the revolution, Rousseau’s political treatise was readily available in several compilations of his works. The fact, however, that the text generated several interpretations reflects the considerable liberties taken with the text but also the text’s own predisposition to misreadings and non-readings and its susceptibility to be used as a symbol more than anything else. It is precisely this symbolic dimension that explains the revolutionaries’ attachment to a book which was politically unpractical and whose disapproval of representation contradicted the form of government they pursued (Swenson, 2000, 167–74).

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When the Club de femmes à Lyon started organizing meetings to read the Social Contract together, Louis-Marie Prudhomme, a revolutionary journalist who founded Les Révolutions de Paris, wrote an article where he tried to dissuade the women from such a perilous activity and what is more based his argument on none other than Rousseau. He writes, Does a mother need to read books to raise her children? Doesn’t she have the book of nature and of her heart? [ . . . ] Why do we care so much in this club of Lyonnaises to teach to the young Citizens entire chapters from J. J. Rousseau’s Social Contract? Didn’t he believe that La Fontaine’s fables were beyond the reach of children? (quoted from Rousseau, 1965–98, Vol. 47, 96) Prudhomme then concludes by entreating the women to stay in their homes, ‘We beg the good Citizens of Lyon to stay in their homes, to look after their household [ . . . ] without pretending to understand the Social Contract as if it was an easy book.’ When the women protested Prudhomme’s observations, through a letter written by the Citizen Charton, the President of the Club, Prudhomme brushed their criticism by resorting once again to Rousseau, As for the rest, if there are reproaches to make to the article in question, the Citizen Charon needs to address them to J.J. Rousseau, whose natural principles we profess. Julie Volmar would have certainly never taken her children to the club of the Citoyennes of Lyon. (quoted from Rousseau, 1965–98, Vol. 47, 99) Prudhomme’s claim to the women of Lyon to follow Rousseau’s teachings and at the same time to give up their desire of reading his book, besides reflecting the journalist’s misogyny, resonates with one of the Balzacian quotes cited at the beginning of this article, ‘the bourgeois of Paris [ . . . ] admires Moliere, Voltaire, and Rousseau on faith, and buys their books without ever reading them.’ Publication and reading in this case do not necessarily complement each other, and in Rousseau’s case the gap between the two is further exacerbated by the religious dimension given to the Social Contract. Instead of the textual significance of the book – and this is what is implied by Prudhomme’s beseeching – it is its spirit that counts. It is precisely through this Pauline perspective that we can understand Rousseau’s authorship of the revolution and also the lack of causality implied by such an affirmation. To say that Rousseau wrote something which

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transpired posthumously means that the spiritual dimension Rousseau gives to his own works prepares the possibility of an authorship where the effect supersedes the cause. Since Rousseau’s objective was to reinvent the notion of people as a political force, he needed to devise a new origin for the creation of the world. The effect of Rousseau’s treatise is thus to redefine the cause, and this reverse causality entails an essentialist dimension that transcends the realm of logical thought. In order to make sense of Rousseau’s distinction of the ‘société civile’ and la ‘société commençante’, Blaise Bachofen and Bruno Bernardi allude to Rousseau’s penchant for reverse causality and write in their introduction of the Discourse on Inequality, ‘A form of causality which we could qualify as retrospective is thus revealed. It is the effects which follow that transform the decisive causes into contingent circumstances. Seen from this point, there is constantly more in the effect than in the cause (something which the model of mechanical causality forbids)’ (Rousseau, 1990a, 14). This is also what is implied by Jean-Joseph Mounier in a quote that weaves through James Swenson’s On Jean-Jacques Rousseau and which reflects how, beyond Rousseau’s own philosophy, reverse causality would also facilitate the posterior consideration of Rousseau as author of the revolution. Swenson writes, ‘Jean-Joseph Mounier [ . . . ] argued that the celebrity of the Social Contract during the Revolution was an effect rather than a cause. It was not in the least the influence of these principles that produced the Revolution. On the Contrary, it was the Revolution that produced their influence’ (Swenson, 2000, 15). This reverse influence which can help us understand Rousseau’s authorship of the revolution is also central to grasp how the Social Contract’s legislator is able to author laws created by a people who are yet to be formed. Just like Rousseau rethinks and reshapes the origin of the world in the Discourse on Inequality, the legislator of the Social Contract needs to preside the citizens’ coming into being, In order for an emerging people to appreciate the healthy maxims of politics, and follow the fundamental rules of Statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be the result of the institution, would have to preside over the founding of the institution itself; and men would have to be prior to laws what they ought to become by means of laws. (Rousseau, 1994a, 156) Since the peripheral legislator of the Social Contract does not write any laws, those written by the citizens need to reflect his influence on them. The social spirit which would safeguard the foundations of the republic and

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which it is the legislator’s duty, as pedagogue, to inculcate to the masses should antedate the laws and the institutions themselves. The legislator’s authorship is retrospective in the same way Rousseau’s will be during the revolution. It is an invisible authorship where the spirit religiously supersedes the text and where the mythical supplants the causal. Before the citizens of the Social Contract decide on the laws of the republic, they are infused with a spirit that paradoxically predestines them towards their legislative pronouncements. The spirit is not dictated through authoritative measures. Instead it is impressed on people by the soft force of habit. Since it is not written, the spirit is not conceived of as an external mandate and since it is fluid, it can be renewed and it can easily revisit and revise the foundational story of either the institution or its people. Regardless of Rousseau’s real intentions, he became the author of the revolution because the spirit of his writing was revisited and revised to sanctify the event. That the revolutionaries chose Rousseau as their intercessor is not surprising because more than any other eighteenth-century philosopher, Rousseau’s political philosophy championed the supremacy of the spirit over the letter. During the revolution, it was therefore Rousseau’s spirit that dominated and not precisely his letter. Often unread and misunderstood, the Social Contract had nonetheless become the Bible of an era.

Notes 1

The intelligence Vautrin displays in the Comédie humaine suggests that he has read Rousseau. The careless slip might reflect instead his awareness that nobody else will catch it. 2 In his discourse ‘Sur les rapports des idées religieuses et morales’ of May 1794, Robespierre attacks atheism and the materialist philosophers, and while urging the importance of religious faith as a means to cement the ideas of the revolution, he turns to the figure of Rousseau who, Robespierre writes, is ‘worthy of the ministry as preceptor of humankind’ (cited and translated in Chartier, 1991, 88). 3 Since language supposes the existence of society, Rousseau does not believe or refuses to believe that it might have had a role in the state of nature. In contrast to Rousseau’s, Condillac’s account of the development of language seems more scientific and reflects the views of most of the other philosophes. Condillac refuses any innate or metaphysical considerations, and defends the creation of language as following a materialist maturation that starts with the involuntary movements of the body. On the supposed religious nature of Rousseau’s account of language, Joesph Garat, professor at the École normale, declares in 1800, ‘How does he unravel the threads of this problem he helped knot? Just like bad poets unravelling the threads of a bad tragedy, by calling upon a divinity to descend on earth to

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teach man the first words of the first language, to teach man the alphabet’ (cited in Roussel, 1972, 29). 4 In a different book on the French Revolution, Quinet reiterates the same idea, ‘In an edified Catholic France, unprepared for liberty, we see the Revolution partially keep, at first, the exclusive temperament of the Church it replaced’ (Quinet, 1845, 351). 5 Writing shortly after the Reign of Terror, Volney tries to draw a connection between the violent upheaval of the revolution and the fanatical embrace of Rousseau’s ideas. 6 During the French Revolution, the Civic Certificates were mainly delivered to public officials and attested to their patriotism. They were used to brush away any accusations of treachery. 7 The republicanism professed by the legislators of the revolution leads to many comparisons with Numa and Lycurgus. In Leçons d’Histoire, Volney (1800, 181) emphasizes the religious dimension of the new devotion for Greek or Roman myths, ‘Having emancipated ourselves from the Jewish fanaticism, let us now repress that Vandal or Roman fanaticism, which, under political denominations, would lead us back to all the fury of religious contests’. 8 Regarding the general question of what the eighteenth century read and how it read, see Mornet, 1989; Darnton, 1995; Swenson, 2000, 16–31. Regarding the publication of the Social Contract in post-revolutionary France see Palmer, 1959, 19–27. 9 In Édition and sédition, Robert Darnton writes (1991, 174), ‘Research tends to confirm Daniel Mornet’s old discovery, that even if the Contrat social was the “bible” of the French Revolution, this work was very little known in pre-revolutionary France’.

Chapter 6

The General Will between Conservation and Revolution Holger Ross Lauritsen

Introduction Victor Hugo’s famous assertion that the French Revolution was ‘Rousseau’s fault’ is but one example of the many different views on the relationship between Rousseau’s philosophy and phenomena such as revolutions and insurrections. One of the difficulties in such discussions is that in order to judge whether Rousseau’s philosophy had an impact on the French Revolution, let alone later revolutions, it seems that one would first have to determine more generally the possibility of causal relations between political philosophy and political practice. It is, however, also possible to discuss assertions such as Hugo’s without answering this general philosophical question, namely, by examining to what extent Rousseau’s philosophy or elements in it can be used to legitimate insurrections or revolutions, without discussing if this legitimation should be considered as an inspiration or as an instrumentation. Such is the method used in this article. The fact is that Rousseau, despite his explicit rejections of the prospect of a revolution,1 has been invoked in several revolutionary and insurrectional situations. Besides the French revolutionary leaders, one could mention Fidel Castro, who once declared having combated Battista with the Social Contract in his pocket (Gagnebin, 1964, xvxvi). The intention here is not to discuss whether such invocations are just, but to examine which are the concepts or arguments in the works of Rousseau that make them possible. Without further ado, it should be stated that the most important concept in this respect is that of the general will. At this point, however, an ambiguity arises. As Etienne Balibar puts it: Rousseau’s concept of the general will, such as the revolution disperses it as a real slogan, never ceases to oscillate between the two poles of the constitution and the insurrection. You can refer to it in order to legitimate

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a state, but you can also refer to it in order to legitimate a revolution. (Balibar, 1997, 105–6) The paradox is that, apparently, the very concept by means of which a revolution can be legitimated – the general will – can also be used to legitimate an existing order. This article is an attempt to explain this paradox. The argument is separated into four parts. First, the conservative function of the concept of the general will be imputed to its indivisibility. Secondly, the revolutionary function of this concept will be imputed to its inalienability. Thirdly, it will be shown that such a dichotomy is in fact too simple and that indivisibility can also have an insurrectional function. Finally, it will be argued that this insurrectional reconciliation between indivisibility and inalienability can be conceived of as a ‘Maoist’ revolutionary government, but that such a reconciliation is contrary to the spirit of Rousseau’s philosophy.

Conservating Indivisibility One of the first left-wing critiques of Rousseau was made by Marx and Engels who considered the concept of the general will as being opposed to a proletarian emancipation. It seems that this critique can be resumed in an attack on the indivisible character of the general will. In the Social Contract, this indivisibility is expressed as follows: ‘Sovereignty [ . . . ] is indivisible. For either the will is general or it is not; it is either the will of the body of the people, or that of only a part’ (Rousseau, 1997e, 58). Since there can only be one general will in the nation, a will that represents a part of the people is illegitimate. Rousseau provides the following explanation: When factions arise, small associations at the expense of the large association, the will of each one of these associations becomes general in relation to its members and particular in relation to the State; [ . . . ] Finally, when one of these associations is so large that it prevails over all the rest, the result you have is no longer a sum of small differences, but one single difference. (Ibid., 60) Marx and Engels also address these ‘factions’ and ‘associations’, but they call them classes and consider them as the foundation of every society. Thus, the ‘one single difference’ denounced by Rousseau strongly resembles the Marxian class struggle, and, as is well known, Marx and Engels claim that ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

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struggles’ (Marx and Engels, 1848). Consequently, the existence of a general will is claimed to be but an illusion or, more precisely, ideology. That is to say, the purpose of invocating such a will is to disguise the will of the ruling class. As Marx and Engels put it, the ruling class always ‘represent[s] its interest as the common interest of all the members of society’ (Marx and Engels, 1845). A slightly different left-wing critique of Rousseau is made by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. According to Rancière, the problem with Rousseau, as well as with contractualism in general, is that he begins by initially breaking down the people into individuals, which, in one go, exorcizes the class war of which politics exists (Rancière, 1998, 79). On the face of it, such a critique could be considered Marxian. The difference is, however, that while Marx and Engels stress the result of the social contract, the general will, as opposed to the reality of class struggle, Rancière denounces the presupposition of this contract, that is, the existence of independent individuals, free to enter into a contract. Moreover, Rancière now claims that, although this presupposition too functions as a veil over class struggle, it also contains an emancipatory potential. In fact, the presupposition of individual freedom can be used as a tool against repression: [With the concept of the social contract], freedom has become peculiar to individuals as such and [ . . . ] the fable of alienation will give rise to the question of knowing whether and under what conditions individuals may alienate this freedom completely – in a word, it will give rise to the right of the individual as nonright of the state, the entitlement of anyone at all to question the state or to serve as proof of its infidelity to its own principle. (Ibid., 79) The ‘fable of alienation’ inherent in contractualism is certainly conservating, but it also opens up the question concerning the conditions of the legitimacy of this very alienation. As to Rousseau, his definition of these conditions is clear and radical. True, he demands, as mentioned, that the alienation must be total, but the condition therefore is a total recovery of the alienated rights. The individual can only give up his rights and liberty in so far as he recovers them all in the community. Thus, the goal of the social contract is ‘to find a form of association [ . . . ] by means of which each, uniting with all, nevertheless obey only himself and remain as free as before’ (Rousseau, 1997e, 49–50).


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We are dealing here with one of the central paradoxes of Rousseau’s philosophy. The individual must give up the whole of his rights and liberty to the general will in order to maintain the indivisibility of this will. However, he can legitimately do so only if, in return, he recovers it all, rights and liberty. This central paradox is even more apparent in the fact that, despite the demand of a total alienation, another central notion in the Social Contract is that of inalienability. More precisely, it is asserted that, while the general will is indivisible, the exercise of this will, namely sovereignty, is inalienable. Now, as hinted at by Rancière, it can be argued that it is exactly because of this indivisibility that the concept of the general will can be used in order to legitimate a revolution.

Revolutionary Inalienability Rousseau’s philosophical formulation of the notion of inalienability is that ‘sovereignty, since it is nothing but the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated’ (ibid., 57). A more concrete political formulation is given a few lines later: If [ . . . ] the people promises simply to obey, it dissolves itself by this very act, it loses its quality of being a people; as soon as there is a master, there is no more sovereign, and the body politic is destroyed forthwith. (Ibid.) Here, the notion of inalienability most clearly implies a radical subversive, indeed anarchist, conception of the concept of the general will. The ‘body politic’, that is to say, the general will, does simply not exist if ‘the people’ obeys any ‘master’. Now, one might ask, what would that mean more concretely? What would a society look like, where nobody obeys any master? A possible answer can be found in Rousseau’s refutation of any kind of political representation (‘Sovereignty cannot be represented for the same reason that it cannot be alienated’ (ibid., 114). More technically, the idea is that, while the executive power can be entrusted to one or more persons, only the people as such can legitimately exercise the legislative power. The only legitimate legislative assembly is the whole of the people because ‘the Sovereign can act only when the people is assembled’ (ibid., 110). This, however, is obviously impossible. Rousseau himself – despite his claim that ‘the bounds of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think’ (ibid.) – is perfectly aware of the fact that, except in very small states,

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it is impossible to gather together the entire ‘people’ on a regular basis in order to discuss the laws of the republic. Thus, in his proposition for a reformation of the government of Poland, he admits that ‘the legislative power cannot show itself as such, and can act only by delegation’ (Rousseau, 1997a, 200–1). True, Rousseau endeavours to limit the power of the Polish diet by means of imperative mandates and a frequent renewal of the representatives (ibid., 201). The fact remains, however, that he betrays his critique of political representation as soon as he makes a proposition for a concrete political structure. Does this mean that one should simply reject Rousseau’s critique of political representation? From a strictly philosophical point of view, one would have the right to do so. However, as we are dealing here with the different uses of Rousseau, it should be noted that this critique has actually played a part in political history despite the impossibility of its institutional implementation. For instance, as James Swenson points out, this critique was invoked by different political orators during the entire French Revolution (Swenson, 2000, 194–225). Speaking of insurrection, it is of particular interest that, if also popular movements during the revolution had a link to Rousseauism, this can be seen as a direct consequence of Rousseau’s critique of representation. As Swenson puts it, although these movements ‘seldom show the direct imprint of Rousseau’s language’, they ‘can be seen to be largely compatible with the construction of Rousseau’s doctrine that centers on the inalienability of sovereignty’ (ibid., 217), in particular, the critique of representation. In fact, Rousseau’s assertion that ‘the instant a People gives itself Representatives, it ceases to be free; it ceases to be’ (Rousseau, 1997e, 115) could be understood less as a defence of a certain political system, namely a system without representation, than as a de-legitimization of every political system, given that, as we have seen, no political system without representation is possible. In other words, Rousseau’s critique of political representation can be used to legitimate any revolt at any time. It should, therefore, be clear how the concept of the general will can serve as a legitimation of insurrection: Sovereignty, that is to say, ‘the exercise of the general will’, is inalienable, and therefore political representation is illegitimate. At the same time, political representation is unavoidable, and, therefore, insurrections are always legitimate. True, such a radical anarchist reading of Rousseau might seem a bit far-fetched; the point is, however, that it is a possible reading which has operated, although rarely explicitly, in different collective imaginations.


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Now, it could be maintained that Rousseau was actually aware of the possibility of such an anarchist reading. Thus, after having claimed, as quoted above, that ‘as soon as there is a master, there is no more sovereign’, he makes a restriction: This is not to say that the commands of the chiefs may not be taken for general wills as long as the sovereign is free to oppose them and does not do so. In such a case the people’s consent has to be presumed from universal silence. (Ibid., 57–8) This idea is quite sophisticated and seems both to render the anarchist reading more likely and to bring it nearer to a somewhat practicable kind of politics. While Rousseau maintains that it is always legitimate for the people to oppose a political decision made by a political leader, for instance, a representative, he underscores that this does not mean that every such decision is illegitimate. In fact, as long as the people do not revolt against such decisions, they should be considered as legitimate. However, as the absence of revolt can obviously be due to repression, Rousseau adds that the people must be ‘free to oppose’ a decision or a command, that is to say, free to revolt. It thus seems that, as a correlate to what is here called (deliberately anachronistically) the ‘radical anarchist’ reading of Rousseau, it is possible to construct a more ‘moderate’ or ‘realistic’ anarchist reading. This reading too, however, contains several problems. In particular, it should be asked what is actually meant when ‘a people’ is said to be free to revolt? Does it mean that the people have the right to revolt? Such an interpretation seems contradictory, revolts being by definition illegal. Nevertheless, Rousseau might have thought of such a solution. As a matter of fact, when discussing the Constitution of Poland, he praises a specific law that could be understood as a legitimation of revolt. This law provides that under certain circumstances it is possible to create a so-called confederative diet where for instance the normal right of veto does not apply, and, when Rousseau states that ‘this federative form [ . . . ] strikes me as a masterpiece of politics’ (Rousseau, 1997a, 219–20), it is, according to Sven StellingMichaud, exactly because he ‘sees in this practice a legal form of insurrection’ (Stelling-Michaud, 1978, 1778). As mentioned, popular uprisings during the French Revolution were often if not explicitly referring to Rousseau’s critique of representation, then compatible with it. Other initiatives during the revolution in fact pointed towards this legalization or institutionalization of revolts that Rousseau saw in the

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Polish constitution. Thus, the so-called Girondin constitution from 1793 lay down a ‘legal means of protest [reclamation] requiring a new examination of the law’ (Swenson, 2000, 223). The idea was that such claims could ‘begin with the action of a single citizen’ and then ‘require [ . . . ] majority support from progressively larger bodies’ until they became ‘the object of a yes or no vote on the national level’ (ibid.). Now, both the Polish confederative diet and the Girondin constitution are indeed very interesting. One might even agree with Swenson that the latter constitution is ‘the most democratic constitution ever proposed’ (ibid., 224). However, the problem remains. Insurrection or revolt cannot be inscribed into the constitution; it is per definition something extra-constitutional. This problem is indicated by Rousseau’s admission that, in the end, the functioning of the confederative diet is dependent on the Polish citizen’s ‘truly heroic zeal’ (Rousseau, 1997a, 219), that is, something extra-constitutional (Baczko, 1978, 75). In other words, it seems that what we called the moderate or realist anarchist reading must be abandoned. The only possible anarchist reading of Rousseau is a radical one that not only legitimates every insurrection, but also de-legitimizes every institutional or administrative decision made by any delegate.

Indivisible Insurrection To sum up, two opposing interpretations of the concept of the general will have now been presented. One stresses the indivisibility of the general will – it stresses that the general will is a will – and shows how this indivisibility can be invoked in order to legitimate the conservation of an established order against the aspirations of different groups or classes. The other stresses the inalienability of the general will – it stresses that the general will is general – and shows how this inalienability can be used to legitimate insurrection or revolution. Indivisibility is linked to conservation, inalienability to revolution. In fact, the matter turns out to be a bit more complex as there is also an evident link between indivisibility and revolution. In order to explain this, we will return to Rancière who in fact tends to claim, without saying it explicitly, that unity, and by consequence indivisibility, is always conservating. On the contrary, the essence of emancipatory politics is the display of a ‘disagreement’, for instance, the class struggle. Moreover, this disagreement should not be regarded only as a disagreement between two entities, say, between


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the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; it is also a disagreement inside each of these entities. As he puts it: The class struggle is [ . . . ] politics itself [ . . . ] This is not to say that politics exists because social groups have entered into battle over their divergent interests. The torsion or twist that causes politics to occur is also what establishes each class as being different from itself. (Ranciére, 1998, 18, my italics) It has already been shown that this position causes Rancière to denounce the indivisibility of the general will. However, Rancière calls this denouncement, and indeed the whole of his critique of unity, into question when he makes the following claim: ‘In place of the peoples Rousseau or Marx sent packing, there emerges here, there, and everywhere an ethnic people pinned down as identical to themselves, as one body set up against others’ (ibid., 98). Rancière deplores that the conception of the people as an ethnic or cultural entity has replaced both Rousseau’s and Marx’s conceptions of the people as a revolutionary political subject. However, are these conceptions not but descriptions of a certain unity of emancipatory movements? True, this unity is not a cultural unity, but a political one, and Rancière might, moreover, claim that such a unity is of a special sort, containing internal differences or disagreements. Though, it remains that he apparently admits that a certain kind of unity is needed for an emancipatory movement to exist. More generally the problem is that, if, according to Rancière, the accentuation of the inalienability of sovereignty can be used to legitimate insurrections or revolutions, this can only occur on a very abstract level. In order to legitimate a specific insurrection or revolution, it must be shown or claimed that we are actually dealing here with an expression of the general will. Now, if the concept of indivisibility is completely rejected at the expense of that of inalienability, such a claim would never be possible because every insurrection, even those with the smallest consistency, can always be claimed to be an alienation of the freedom of the individuals who participate in it. To put in another way, it is not necessary to be a Leninist in order to maintain that no serious insurrection is possible without a certain level of organization, that is to say, without a certain level of discipline. Rancière simply fails to see that, even when an insurrection, a revolution or a political movement can be said to have overall emancipating effects (which is obviously not always the case), sacrifices are always demanded. It thus seems that the ambiguity of the concept of the general will, its oscillation between conservation and revolution, should not be ascribed

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exclusively to a conflict between indivisibility and inalienability. This ambiguity is also due to a contradiction inside the concept of indivisibility, that is, a conflict between different uses of this concept. An example hereof is found, for instance, in one of Maximilien Robespierre’s most famous discourses, where the question is posed, ‘Is not the terrible war waged by liberty on tyranny indivisible?’ (Robespierre, 2007, 115). In fact, there are two possible interpretations of this reference to indivisibility. That is, it can be conceived of as a beneficial unifying gesture at this crucial point of the revolution (February 1794) where the republic is threatened from several sides, or it can be understood as a way for Robespierre to legitimate an eradication of his enemies. Whether one should adopt one or the other of these attitudes, depends on an appraisal of the historical and political circumstances, that is to say, the course and the character of the French Revolution. Now, a thinker who completely endorses the most controversial part of the French Revolution, that is, the Reign of Terror, is Alain Badiou. As it might be formulated, Badiou understands the indivisibility of ‘the war waged by liberty on tyranny’ expressed by Robespierre as the unity of an emancipatory revolutionary movement and not as a means of repression. Whether this is an appropriate vision of the French Revolution will not be discussed here.2 On the other hand, the interesting point is that this positive vision on indivisibility also manifests itself in Badiou’s highly original reading of Rousseau. As Badiou approvingly puts it: For Rousseau ‘[emancipatory] politics is indecomposable [ . . . ] For [emancipatory] politics, ultimately, is the existence of the people’ (Badiou, 2005a, 348). The ‘people’, that is to say, the revolutionary or insurrectional movement, can only exist as a unity, and that is exactly what the notion of indivisibility (or ‘non-decomposability’) points out. In other words, the departure point of Badiou’s reading of Rousseau is the mentioned insurrectional function of the concept of indivisibility by which a contradiction was revealed inside this very concept. However, a particular feature in Badiou’s reading is that he manages to dissolve this contradiction. Indeed, he seems to find in the works of Rousseau a completely coherent philosophy of insurrection or revolution where none of the mentioned ambiguities are present. This reading can be resumed as follows: Rousseau ‘frees [emancipatory] politics from the state [ . . . ] As a procedure [ . . . ] [emancipatory] politics cannot tolerate delegation or representation. It resides entirely in the “collective being” of its citizen-militants’ (ibid., 347). Badiou claims that Rousseau completely separates politics, that is, the politics of emancipation, from the state, and it is this claim that makes it possible for Badiou to solve the contradiction inherent to the concept of indivisibility. In fact, this contradiction can also be described as a conflict


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between an institutional indivisibility (the indivisibility of the political institutions of an existing society, the state) and an insurrectional indivisibility. Now, by asserting that the general will has nothing to do with any kind of institution, Badiou discounts the first kind of indivisibility and he thus avoids the conflict. No doubt, this reading is unorthodox, and once again it should be stressed that we are dealing here only with a possible reading of Rousseau and not with an attempt to find out what Rousseau actually meant. It should be noted, however, that Badiou’s reading offers a solution to another central contradiction in the works of Rousseau, namely, the question of the origin of society. It seems in fact that there are two such origins, that is, on the one hand, a contract, displayed first and foremost in the Social Contract, and, on the other hand, a usurpation. The latter is described in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men: The rich, under the pressure of necessity, at last conceived of the most well-considered project ever to enter the human mind; to use even his attackers’ forces in his favour, to make his adversaries his defenders [ . . . ] ‘Les us unite,’ he told them, ‘to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure for everyone the possession of what belongs to him [ . . . ]’ [ . . . ] Such was, or must have been, the origin of Society and of Laws, which gave the weak new fetters and the rich new forces. (Rousseau, 1997b, 172–4) The rich have created the current structures of society by fooling the poor into accepting legal structures that ensure the existing unequal distribution of wealth, thereby creating property. There is no need for underlining the similarity of this conception of the origin of society with the Marxian conception of class struggle as the essence of every society and the state as the tool of the bourgeoisie. As mentioned, on the other hand, Marx and Engels are in a clear opposition to the more well-known ‘classical’ Rousseauist view on the origin of society as a contract between free individuals. In order to understand how Badiou’s reading can be considered as a reconciliation between these two conceptions of the origin of society, we might consider at first Jean Starobinski’s solution of the same problem (Starobinski, 1971, 44–6). According to the latter, the entering into the social contract could be considered as a revolution in an already established society, founded through usurpation. Thus, the Social Contract could be read ‘as the continuation, indeed as the conclusion of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’ (ibid., 44), instead of reading the two texts as mutually contradictory.

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In a word, Starobinski solves the problem concerning the two origins of society by regarding the social contract as a revolution. As to Badiou, his solution strongly resembles that of Starobinski, but there is an important difference. In Badiou’s reading, that is, the establishment of the contract does not exactly correspond to a revolution. A revolution is an establishment of a new contract between all the members of the society, whereas, in Badiou’s reading, the contract is entered into only by the members of the revolutionary movement. That is to say, according to Badiou, the theory of the contract is not a description of the birth of a new society through a revolution, but a description of the birth of the revolutionary movement itself. In the light of this difference between Starobinski and Badiou, it can be seen how Badiou manages to elaborate a complete reconciliation between the two kinds of indivisibility. As mentioned, such a reconciliation is dependent on a complete separation between the general will and any kind of institution. This separation, however, is also necessarily a separation between revolution (or insurrection) and institutions. Thus, Badiou sees in the social contract only a revolutionary movement and not, as Starobinski, a proper revolution, that is to say, an establishment of new institutions. Moreover, it would seem that, in order to remain really pure and indivisible, this revolutionary movement can hardly have any institutional claims. Now, this radical separation between revolutionary movement and institutions is a central theme not only in Badiou’s reading of Rousseau, but in Badiou’s philosophy in general. As he puts it, ‘politics has no aim other than itself ’ (Badiou, 2005b, 84). This is indeed an extreme assertion that has been and should be criticized. True, it can be claimed that, to a certain extent, the logic of revolutions and political movements often implies that the continuation of the movement becomes more important than the fulfilment of the original demands. However, to assert that politics has no aim other than itself amounts to fully ignoring the existence of such demands. And it must be admitted that it is rather difficult to conceive of a revolutionary or rebellious movement that does not make any institutional demands at all, whether these are ‘revolutionary’, that is to say, concerning the creation of a new fundamental political structure, or ‘reformist’, and so formulated within the existing structures. This critique of Badiou will not be elaborated further here.3 The purpose of mentioning it is but to point out that Badiou has created a Rousseau that can be criticized in the same way. That is to say, in so far as Badiou presents a possible reading of Rousseau, the conflict between inalienability and indivisibility in the latter’s philosophy can be said to point towards a complete separation between revolution and institution, and such a separation is absurd. In Badiou’s philosophy, this absurdity manifests itself in the fact


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that Badiou only considers extremely few rebellious or revolutionary political movements as real emancipatory movements.4 As regards Rousseau, it could be claimed that the same tendency finds expression in his infamous pessimism. For instance, when he states that, although the general will is indestructible, it often ‘grows mute’ (Rousseau, 1997e, 122), this resembles Badiou’s claim that ‘[true] politics is rare’ (Badiou, 2005b, 119), which substantially seems to mean that true politics, emancipatory politics, is impossible.

Revolutionary Government It has been argued, by means of Badiou’s reading of Rousseau, that the apparently mutually contradictory notions of indivisibility and inalienability can be reconciled in the conception of an indivisible insurrection, but that such a reconciliation has a price, namely the possibility of insurrection. It will now be shown, however, that there is another possible version of this reconciliation. In fact, the separation between insurrection and institutions can be replaced by the simple absence of institutions, or at least stable institutions. Such an absence will here be called revolutionary government.5 A revolutionary government can be described as a revolutionary movement that ends up taking power, but which afterwards, instead of establishing a new lasting order, chooses to continue the revolution by organizing constant popular uprisings. One of the characteristics of such a government is, so to speak, a lack of enemies. The old enemy, the former state power, has been destroyed, but, as the revolution must go on, new enemies have to be invented, and this is done by pointing out certain groups or individuals as ‘enemies of the revolution’. Although this description might appear as rather schematic, and although history is obviously always more complex than philosophical political theory, the logic of revolutionary government can be recognized in the course of the Cultural Revolution in China. Thus, in 1966, Mao Zedong called for a popular uprising even though the communist party already possessed power. Over the following years, the Red Guards travelled through the country and attacked everyone who seemed, in one way or another, to exhibit the ‘Four Olds’, that is to say, the ideas, cultures, habits and customs of pre-revolutionary China. Thus, in so far as revolutionary government can be seen as a possible reconciliation between indivisibility and inalienability, that is to say, a solution to the central paradox in Rousseau’s political philosophy, and in so far as the Cultural Revolution was a concrete example of revolutionary

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government, it seems that it is actually possible to establish a link between Rousseau and the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, as it has from time to time been asserted (Talmon, 1952). Besides, it should not be of any surprise that we have discovered this link if not in then through Badiou’s reading of Rousseau. The fact is that Badiou not only was a Maoist in the seventies, he is also, perhaps, the only widely recognized philosopher who still claims to draw on the Maoist legacy. Before returning to this link between Rousseau and Mao, it may be appropriate to consider what defines a revolutionary government. In fact, such a government can be seen (still a bit schematically) as a possible solution to a problem that emerges in every ‘successful’ revolution after the conquest of the state power. This problem manifests itself for instance in a speech by one of the leading figures of the French Revolution, Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelle: When the social body is oppressed by the legislative body, the only means of resistance is insurrection; but it would be absurd to organize it, for it has different characters [ . . . ] It is [ . . . ] impossible to determine the nature and the character of insurrections; we must abandon ourselves to the people’s genius, and rely upon its justice and its prudence. (Quoted from Swenson, 2000, 224–5) The problem is: Once you have won the revolution, how can you prevent the ‘new power’ from repressing the people? Or, how can you ensure that, if this happens, the people will rise again? Hérault de Séchelle’s answer is that, after all, nothing can be done. We can only have confidence that the people will rise if necessary. Revolutionary government is another answer to this question, as exemplified by the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee’s declaration at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in August 1966. True, at some points this declaration resembles that of Hérault de Séchelle, for example when it is claimed that you should ‘trust the masses, rely on them and respect their initiative’ (‘Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’, in Schoenhals, 1996, 36). However, the difference between the two attitudes is clear and crucial: ‘What the Central Committee of the Party demands of the Party committees at all levels is that they persevere in giving correct leadership, put daring above everything else, boldly arouse the masses [ . . . ]’ (ibid., 35). The CCP Central Committee wants to ‘arouse the masses’ in order to save the revolution. As to Hérault de Séchelle, he certainly agrees that the


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masses must rise, but what he underscores is precisely that they cannot be aroused: ‘The only means of resistance is insurrection; but it would be absurd to organize it ’. The fundamental difference between these two attitudes concerns the tasks of the new body of power that is born from a revolution. According to Hérault de Séchelle, this body should begin creating new institutions, knowing that these easily risk becoming repressive, but having confidence that, if such a thing happens, the people will rise. On the other hand, according to the CCP Central Committee, the new body of power should mainly organize popular uprisings and thus teach the people how to avoid new repression. Or one could say that the task of a revolutionary government is not so much to devise just and efficient laws than to ensure that the right revolutionary mood reigns in the souls of the citizens. If we now return to Rousseau, it could be claimed that this idea would not be new to him. True, Rousseau never advocates for revolutionary government, but his conception of a government which is not occupied mainly with proper laws, but rather with ‘morals, customs, and above all [ . . . ] opinion’ (Rousseau, 1997e, 81) seems to correspond to the goals of a revolutionary government. Once again, it should be stressed that such a ‘Maoist’ reading of Rousseau is not an attempt to discover what Rousseau ‘actually’ meant. The important thing is that it is a possible use of elements in Rousseau’s philosophy. Or more precisely, revolutionary government is a possible solution to the central contradiction in Rousseau’s philosophy between indivisibility and inalienability. In fact, it is a fusion of these notions. On the one hand, the inalienability expressed in insurrections is no longer threatening the indivisibility of the central body of power since such insurrections are not directed against this body, but against other (and more or less invented) enemies. On the other hand, the indivisibility of the central body of power no longer tries to hinder insurrections expressing inalienability; on the contrary, this body is itself organizing insurrections.

Conclusion In this article, it has been shown that, if Rousseau’s political philosophy can be interpreted both as a legitimation of conservation and as a legitimation of revolution, this is due to a fundamental contradiction, in this philosophy, between the indivisibility and the inalienability of the general will. However, the relationship between, on the one hand, the two different legitimations

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and, on the other hand, the two sides in the contradiction is a complex one. If inalienability is linked exclusively to revolution, indivisibility is linked both to conservation and revolution. In fact, the indivisibility of the general will can be understood both as the indivisibility of an existing society and as that of a revolutionary movement. Finally, it has been shown that a possible solution to all these contradictions resides in the concept of revolutionary government. This ‘Maoist’ reading of Rousseau, however, deserves a concluding remark. In fact, if we forget for a moment the claim that this article is not concerned with the question about what Rousseau actually meant, it is apparent that this elegant solution of the fundamental conflict in his political philosophy is in opposition to the spirit of this philosophy. This spirit has often been highlighted, both by exegetes and by Rousseau himself. As he puts it: ‘You want one to be always consistent; I doubt that this is possible for a man; but what is possible for him is to be always true. That is what I will try to be’ (Rousseau, 1961b, 27). Apparently, truth is not compatible with consistency. In order to find any truth in Rousseau’s philosophy, therefore, one should perhaps cease attempting to solve its fundamental contradictions, but rather display them, as this article set out to do. Moreover, if it should indeed be admitted that there is a totalitarian tendency in the concept of the general will, it must be underscored that this tendency is not due to the indivisibility of the general will. Rather, the totalitarianism arises when the concept of the general will is used without awareness of its inherent, indeed constitutive, contradictions. In other words, if Rousseau’s concepts are ambiguous in their oscillation between conservation, revolution and insurrection, this should not be considered a weakness, but a strength. In fact, the ambiguity of these concepts corresponds to the ambiguity inherent in every revolutionary or insurrectional situation, and it is of great importance to be aware of this ambiguity. The purpose of such an awareness, however, should not be to denounce insurrection or revolution as such, but, on the contrary, to save what Hannah Arendt has called the lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition (Arendt, 2006, 171–273). The purpose of this article has been to show the central role Rousseau’s philosophy has played and should still play in this tradition.

Notes 1

For instance when, in his proposition for a reformation of the Polish government, he wishes to avoid ‘all sharp and abrupt change and the danger of revolutions’ (Rousseau, 1997a, 246).

General Will between Conservation and Revolution 2

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It could be mentioned, however, that the French historian Sophie Wahnich’s (2003) recent defense of the reign of terror is rather stimulating. 3 All the more so that such a critique would have to involve a discussion of the concept of ‘forcing’ by means of which Badiou actually introduces a subtle relationship between the revolutionary movement and the institutions (Badiou, 2005b, 410–30). 4 He seems to be of the opinion that, when it comes to the point, no real political ‘event’ has taken place since the Russian Revolution. 5 The notion derives from the French Revolution. However, whether this revolution was actually marked by the logic here designated with this concept is not clear. This discussion will not be addressed here, but Hérault de Séchelle’s remark quoted below certainly points towards another appraisal of the French Revolution.

Chapter 7

Rousseau and Revolution in the Making of a Modern Political Culture: Denmark 1750–1850 Bertel Nygaard

Introduction Rousseau’s political thought and the problem of revolution have been studied for more than two centuries by political philosophers and historians alike. Most existing studies tend to focus either on exegesis of Rousseau’s own texts or on his reception within revolutionary France or one of the other big, powerful political units in Europe, especially Britain and the German states. Rather than merely continuing this tradition, this article proposes to study the impact of the interrelation of Rousseau and revolution on the formation of a particular modern political culture by mapping the reception of Rousseau’s political thought in a smaller, peripheral European state: Denmark.1 This will encompass phenomena from the 1750s till the present but with specific stress on the Age of Revolution, that is, 1789– 1848, when new experiences of revolutionary rupture and agency contributed crucially to forming modern historical imagination and politics. Studying the reception and popularization of Rousseau’s thoughts at the ‘low’ level of its dissemination and vulgarization within a specific emerging modern public, rather than at the ‘high’ levels of theoretical sophistication, may yield important results for a historical understanding of the social and cultural context in which Rousseau became associated with the problem of social and political revolution. However, considerations of space will result in a somewhat narrowly defined category of politics, leaving the important political implications of, say, the broad reception of Émile for future studies. Also, though such a study should work towards a view of history ‘from the bottom up’, the uneven availability of source material often forces the analysis to begin with the most prominent or educated writers in Denmark, giving only hints of conceptions of Rousseau and revolution among the less well-educated or prominent.

Making of a Modern Political Culture

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Choosing Danish history as the field of study may provide more than just an element of exoticism or just another empirical field to put on top of what is already known. From the point of view of Danish history, it may provide a key to understanding important forms of political thought and culture. From the perspective of international history the peripheral position of Denmark and its receptiveness to new political principles originating elsewhere resulted in specific formations of political discourse. On the one hand, these formations reflected general European tendencies, thus providing a good vantage point for the study of transfer across linguistic or political borders. On the other hand, the Danish case also shows a relatively original combination of such features, providing for insights into the dialectics of reform and revolution in social and cultural development. After a few conceptual clarifications and a brief introduction to significant features of Danish development, this article will delineate three main phases in the gradual association of Rousseau and revolution as part of the constitution of a modern political culture: (1) 1750s till the French Revolution, in which Rousseau’s critiques of civilization and private property were read and debated without a modern sense of the problem of revolution; (2) the age of the French Revolution, in which Rousseau reached the height of his popularity and he was initially associated with the historical experience of revolution; (3) from the Restoration of 1815 till the revolutionary wave of 1848, in which Rousseau was rejected by some, hailed by others, as the father of Jacobin radicalism and modern humanism and socialism. In conclusion, a consideration of his small role in post-1850 debates will indicate the relative stability of the association of Rousseau and revolution achieved during the two latter phases.

Modern Political Culture and the Danish Background In the following pages, the category ‘modern political culture’ will be understood as structurally conditioned by the emergence of capitalist society and the modern centralized national state, but also by a new intellectual horizon of expectation: the prospect of change through agency, historically confirmed and generalized by the experience of the French Revolution. At a more phenomenal level this modern political culture included the growth of a bourgeois public opinion as well as processes of politicization, democratization, temporalization and the normalization of change in political and historical discourse.2 The formation of this modern political culture also comprised the emergence of a triangular landscape of positions within political ideology. Each

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of the three interrelated positions may be initially defined by a peculiar relation to the new discourse of change and democratization just mentioned: (1) conservatism, defined by a basic rejection of such change and democratization, whether for traditionalist or religious reasons (e.g. Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, respectively); (2) liberalism, defined by its acceptance of some change and democratization, typically aiming at the supersession of corporatist society by a modern civil society with formal, juridical equality among citizens, as well as a constitution securing the political influence of the educated and possessing middle class (e.g. Benjamin Constant, François Guizot or Karl von Rotteck); (3) radicalism, expanding liberal claims for juridical civic equality and constitutional political rights in order to include social and economic levelling and a broader more inclusive suffrage (e.g. Benthamist radicalism or the European influences of Jacobinism). On the fringes of the latter position modern socialism and communism subsequently developed, demanding breaks with the principle of possessive individualism and the faith in the political state marking all the other ideological positions. All three positions emerged structurally and conceptually at a general European level during the Age of Revolution, especially in the wake of the 1830 wave of revolution (Church, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1973, 138–41). The particular Danish appropriation of such general features of development was shaped by features of its politico-historical development. Since 1660, the Danish kingdom had formally adhered to absolutist principles, but during the eighteenth century it had followed other absolutist states in developing ideals of enlightened rule. This became crucial to the adaptation to modern socio-economic demands posed by an increasingly commercialized international market to which the Danish kingdom adapted mainly through agrarian reforms initiated at least partly from ‘above’, that is, via the political state. This paved the way for the commercial thrift of an increasing number of freeholder peasants. Together, enlightenment ideals and socio-economic incentives also contributed to furthering the political and cultural recognition of the royal subjects as citizens and of some of these citizens as a collective body, forming a public opinion with which the decisions of the monarch were to comply, in theory at least (Seip, 1959; Sørensen, 1983; Horstbøll, 2009; Wåhlin, 1982, 100–12). This public was officially acknowledged at the institutional level with the formation of provincial assemblies of estates with advisory functions in 1831–4. Its definitive recognition as a real political power, however, only occurred with the transition to constitutional monarchy in 1848–9, resulting in a lasting political order of a remarkably democratic nature in comparison to most other post1848 European regimes.


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The enlightened ideals of Danish absolutism provided for a general reception of British, French and German Enlightenment thought in Denmark (Koch, 2003; Stybe, 1978–81; Holm, 1975a, 1975b). Elements of Rousseau’s thought had a prominent place in this cluster of ideas and philosophic writers, yet were always overshadowed by other prominent thinkers, Montesquieu from the 1750s on, Kant during the 1790s and Hegel in 1830–48 (Holm, 1975a, 6 and 36–73; Sørensen, 1983, 33–7 and 54–71; Seip, 1959, 400; Holm, 1975b, 96; Koch, 2003, 34–52; Stewart, 2007; Nygaard, 2007). Still, in the long-term changing role of Rousseau in public debate across these decades we may discern, from a particular angle, the gradual particularization of a modern political landscape through three main phases of development, in which the French Revolution constitutes the centre.

The First Phase: 1750s–1780s The first phase would be Rousseau’s position before the French Revolution. From the mid-1750s restrictions on the freedom of political debate were loosened somewhat to facilitate a debate among learned writers on the best way to reform Danish agriculture. This developed unevenly, a general unrestricted freedom of the press being proclaimed in 1770 under the royal councillor Struensee only to be restricted severely in 1772. Yet, from the mid-1780s till the late 1790s, public deliberation on political theory reemerged (Jørgensen, 1944, 15–28). The most dynamic intellectual milieu consisted of writers associated with the noble academy of Sorø, including Tyge Rothe, Jens Kraft and others. These writers were heavily inspired by German, French and British Enlightenment thought and especially by Montesquieu (Holm, 1975a; Horstbøll, 1990, 167–79). These writers also began to read and admire Rousseau, albeit with more attention to his literary style and pedagogical thoughts than to politics (Carlsen, 1953, 18 and passim). Nevertheless, some elements of his social and political thought, often in more or less vulgarized form, were also debated, rejected or incorporated in their writings.3 In 1759, one of the most remarkable statements from Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, published just 5 years earlier, was rephrased (without explicit reference) in Tyge Rothe’s account of the origins of civil society: [I]f no-one had enclosed a piece of land and then proclaimed: this is mine, then everyone would have remained completely equal; for where there is no property, no wrong will take place; envy is not born before the unequal distribution of advantages, and avarice [Vinde-Syge] remains

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unknown as long as there is no use for unnecessary things. In brief: as long as everyone enjoyed being a human being, all sources of enmity, hatred and destruction among the reasonable inhabitants of the earth would be clogged. (Rothe, 1759, 25; cf. Rousseau, 1971, 205) Rothe thus accepted a basically Rousseauian account of the state of nature as well as the origins and negative impacts of property. The fact that this quote rephrases and expands upon original formulation indicates that Rothe was more than just parroting or copying Rousseau here. Nevertheless, Rothe went on to defend the necessity of both property and the law in order to feed and secure the growing populations (ibid., 26–7). In other words, the implications of this insight turned out too radical for him to really integrate into his thought. A slightly more elaborate use of Rousseau appeared in a treatise on the savage peoples, published in 1760 by mathematician and philosopher Jens Kraft. Kraft stressed elements of degeneration in the development from the state of nature to civilized society and conceived private property as a social construction, replacing an original communal property form. His main point of departure, however, was still a Lockean support of civilization and sociability, and he specifically stressed the point that the original state of virtue implied undesirable limits to the quantitative expansion of humanity (Kraft, 1998, 10–12, 85, 91, 97, 106). An exemplary gaze beyond the writings of the Sorø milieu, that is, the elite among the educated, seems to indicate that such critiques of civilization and private property were limited to only elements of the boldest writings of the era. The general defence of possessive individualism and civilization was reflected in rather less sophisticated criticism of Rousseau. From 1774 till 1777, Nicolai Nannestad, a professor of Hebrew and theology at a secondary school in the town of Odense, published a series of writings defending civilization specifically against the challenge put to it from Rousseau as repeated by Kraft, even though both of them were addressed very respectfully. In Nannestad’s account, Rousseau, the ‘witty and shrewd’ writer, had presented ‘the social and civilized manner of living, not only as unnatural, but also as unfavourable and harmful to the human species’. Nannestad set out to prove that civilization is not alien or unnatural to human beings and that the human species had gained by it, arguing that human beings were obviously ‘fit’ for civilization and that they felt joy at being together (Nannestad, 1774, 7, 12–13 and 15; 1775, 19; 1777, 21). His writings were neither particularly sophisticated nor very influential, yet their very triviality may reflect a widely shared reservation towards Rousseau in the educated public at the time.


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Second Phase: The French Revolution, 1789–1815 With the experience of the French Revolution came the beginnings of some political positions typical of the later years, though this was not yet fixated at the terminological level. The main political theorists in the debates of this era were Kant, Fichte and Thomas Paine. Yet, the revolution also inaugurated a second phase in Rousseau reception, in which he became a much more central figure in political debates and was frequently associated with the revolution, causing praise as well as criticism (Holm, 1909, 122–66 and 1975b). During this era, from 1790 till about 1800, most of Rousseau’s important writings were published in Danish translation, including his Confessions, the Social Contract, On the Origins of Inequality, Émile and others.4 As the titles may suggest, political philosophy as such was still only a part of a much wider concern with his thoughts (Carlsen, 1953, 96; Anonymous, 1801; Hennings, 1797, Jørgensen, 1939, 3). But the European experience of revolution also resulted in more detailed reflections on his political thought. His authority and his distinction between the general will and the will of all were invoked within a general Kantian framework in at least one of the key debates in Denmark during the 1790s: that concerning freedom of the press (Birckner, 1798, 302 and 310; Schlegel, 1797, 22, 28 and 73; cf. Holm, 1909, 217–9; Sørensen, 1983, 86–98). In general, Danish public opinion supported the French Revolution, regarding it a result of the same process of enlightenment and education that Denmark was undergoing under enlightened absolutism. There were strong reservations toward the more violent forms of the revolution and what was perceived as its democratic excesses and mob rule, but these features were often explained in what would later be termed ‘liberal’ fashion as the consequences of old regime despotism or foreign invasion (Kruse, 2004; cf. Holm, 1975b). The earliest Danish associations of Rousseau and revolution expressed a remarkable degree of admiration. While residing in Paris in early 1790, the Danish poet Jens Baggesen described the early stages of the revolution as the tumultuous birth of a child whose character was yet unknown. He presented Paris as the woman in labour, Necker as the titular father and a whole range of eighteenth-century philosophers as the anonymous fathers, the most important of them being Rousseau, ‘perhaps the most electric writer since Homer and Euripides’. The latter group, representing enlightenment and the genius of the age, had advised her to divorce her former husband: the absolutist king, representing despotism, that is, the opposite of

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enlightenment (even though Louis XVI, having been a weak king, more of a ‘wimp’ (Nathue) than a tyrant, had actually co-fathered the new child). The most important element in this enlightenment had been Rousseau’s Social Contract, a ‘sacred book, written by one of her best friends’, which had initially pointed out her ‘demands and rights’. Later, when the passionate woman had wanted to poison her former husband, enlightenment philosophy had persuaded her to only give the king a ‘sleeping potion’ (Baggesen, 1843, 84–5, 98–101). In other words, enlightenment philosophy had caused the revolution, but had also contributed to its moderation and restrained its revolutionary (female) passion by its (male) wisdom. Baggesen’s attitude thus represented a moderate support of the Revolution quite compatible with the support of the enlightened ideals of the Danish monarchy. With the radicalization of the revolution in the ensuing years, judgements on the role of Rousseau’s thought in it were differentiated along political lines. Malthe Conrad Bruun, one of the most ardent Danish supporters of the revolution in the early to mid-1790s, later to be victimized by the government and sent into French exile, emphasized how Rousseau’s Social Contract had ‘terrified the despots and awakened the peoples from their sleep of political bondage’ (Bruun, 1794, 290). However, the counter-revolutionary mirror-image of this praise, for example, Burkean condemnations of Rousseau as the intellectual root of a ‘cabal’ of philosophers and writers leading the revolution, did not gain ground in Danish public debate at this time (cf. Burke, 1986, 283; Süßenberger, 1974, 281–303). There were some open, virulent condemnations of the ‘spirit of recalcitrance’ (Gienstridigheds Aand) installing a new oligarchy in France, but such expressions were few and brief (Iris, 1791, quoted in Kruse, 2004, 182, cf. 179–208). Danish writers certainly knew of such views, though. Bruun’s satirical indictment of counter-revolutionary royalists and aristocrats, Catechism of Aristocrats, for which he was indicted and exiled, contained a tongue-in-cheek condemnation of ‘the demon of liberty’, ‘philosophers’ and ‘democrats’, associating them with ‘the army of Hell’, that is, ‘Voltaire, Friederich, Rousseau and Paine’ (Bruun, 1889, 42). Similarly, one of main pro-revolutionary journals, Politisk og Physisk Magazin, found it necessary to defend the French Revolution from the charge that it had been bred by the writers or by the Enlightenment (Anonymous, 1794; Anonymous, 1799). Also, the liberally inclined countess Charlotte Schimmelmann indignantly reported that the Danish foreign minister, A.P. Bernstorff, had termed her ‘saint’, Rousseau, a scoundrel (un scélérat).5 But significantly, such blank condemnations of Rousseau were not stated publicly, let alone elaborated in writings of political theory. And while the


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anti-aristocratic polemics just mentioned might indicate that Bernstorff’s discrete criminalization of Rousseau expressed a counter-revolutionary sentiment shared by a larger group in Denmark, it is always remarkably, perhaps also revealingly, unclear whether the target is such a group of Danish citizens or just counter-revolutionary positions in general. An important feature of the discourse on Rousseau supporting the latter interpretation is the fact that even writers stressing some affinity or causality between Rousseau and the revolution tended to distinguish rather sharply between Rousseau’s thoughts and the practice of the Jacobins in 1793–94. Malthe Conrad Bruun, rejoicing at the news of the fall of the revolutionary government, praised the post-Thermidorian settlement as the calm predicted by ‘philosophy, i.e. common sense, guided by the experience of history’ (Bruun, 1795, 196). In other words, philosophy, probably meaning that of Rousseau in particular, remained untainted by its association with the revolutionary government. A more critical and thoroughgoing, yet respectful approach to Rousseau can be seen in the writings of August von Hennings, a leading civil servant and publicist in the German principalities under the Danish crown who had had admired the writings of Rousseau since his student days in the 1760s. In 1795 he prefaced a translation of the Social Contract by dissociating Rousseau from the democratic ambitions in France and elsewhere. Hennings noted that Rousseau was sometimes too much of a dreamer, often ‘charmed by the illusion of a possible reality and strengthened in this illusion by the bitterness of the existing state of affairs’. Yet, Hennings emphasized that Rousseau’s thought was far enough removed from any Jacobin faith in ‘popular wisdom’ so as to make him ‘the only true defender of royal privilege’ (Hennings, 1795, 340–1). A different view of Rousseau, yet still with respectful dissociation of the sophisticated philosopher from rude Jacobinism, was elaborated by JohanNikolaus Tetens, formerly professor of philosophy at the university of Kiel, now a counselor of state in the Danish monarchy. In 1793, he published an extended critique of the French constitution of 1791 and the revolutionary party, including considerations of Rousseau’s Social Contract. Tetens distinguished Rousseau clearly from the French practitioners of democracy invoking his authority in making ‘the dreadful history of our times’ (Tetens, 1793, 88). For the French revolutionaries, as well as their most important spokesman at a European level, Thomas Paine, had deliberately reinterpreted democracy as representative government in widely circulated writings and speeches. According to Tetens, this could never result in democracy, but in the rule of demagogues, i.e. a ‘demagocracy’ (ibid., 94–5). This could, of

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course, find support in Rousseau’s book, in which Tetens saw ‘a constitutional theory of true democratism’. This ‘beautiful ideal of a state constitution’ could never become reality, however, for reasons explained by Rousseau himself, namely, the lack of enlightenment in the population at large (ibid., 85–7).7

Third Phase: Repoliticization and Rousseau as Radical Theory As the freedom of the press was re-curbed in Denmark in 1799 and many liberal admirers of the revolution were disappointed at its Bonapartist turn, public debate was remarkably de-politicized for the next three decades. Public political debate was now largely replaced by literary public based on a romantic idealization of poetical genius, advocated in philosophical terms by the Schelling-like philosophy of Henrich Steffens (1996). Only with the European revolutionary wave of 1830–1, including the French July Revolution, the Belgian and Polish national uprisings and other conflicts, did politicization reappear in a larger scale in the Danish public. Though the Danish court and its ministers resented the rebelliousness of such events, it was impossible to ignore the wide-spread enthusiasm it generated among prominent educated writers who emphasized the lawfulness and moderation the July Revolution as opposed to the divisiveness and revolutionary spirit of the first French Revolution (cf., for example, David, 1830). The king was pressed to proclaim the creation of new advisory assemblies of estates in 1831 and to call for a public debate on its details, thus re-opening a political public. This re-politicization took place within an intensified transition to capitalist relations in the Danish agrarian sector following the economic crisis around 1820, thus creating socio-economic conditions for new emphases on the need for a generalization of conceptions of the inhabitants of the kingdom as bourgeois. In this context, the triangular political landscape of conservatism, liberalism and radicalism was finally conceptualized around 1840 and was gradually institutionalized in political parties and alliances of social classes.8 An important ideological component of this process of political differentiation was Hegelian philosophy of history and the state, which could be found within all political currents but gradually became particularly crucial to the liberal struggle for a constitutional monarchy and a strong nation state to replace the absolutist conglomerate state (Stewart, 2007; Nygaard, 2007, Nygaard, 2009b; Friisberg 2003).


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In the intervening depoliticized decades, positive receptions of Rousseau had practically disappeared.9 In its place, romantic idealist writers condemned Rousseau as the incarnation of the revolutionary legacy that was to be defeated and silenced, an interpretation not far removed from the French Ultra-Royalists (Mellon, 1959, 72 and 75; Roussel, 1972, 85–6, 98, 103–6 and 126). Henrich Steffens’ epoch-making introduction to philosophy from 1802–3 characterized Rousseau as part of a modern fall from ‘poetical’ infinity to a ‘prosaic’ worship of the finite and of merely partial understanding (Forstand): ‘The characteristic peculiar to our age is its irreligious character and a dominance of prose hitherto unknown to history, the French nation being the most prosaic among all.’ Accordingly, Steffens described enlightenment and revolutionary France as the site of destruction of the ‘magnificence of the old worlds’ (Steffens, 1996, 139–42). An even clearer, comprehensive condemnation of Rousseau as the seed of revolution and irreligion was expressed in the prominent theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig’s early writings from 1812 on. He presented Rousseau’s thought as a prime expression of the superficial French enlightenment providing the basis of the revolution’s ‘ecstasy of freedom’ and its ‘attempts at making reason independent of faith’ (Grundtvig, 1817, 692 and 719). Even worse, Rousseau had defended democracy, that is, he had presented ‘that constitution of state, by which a people ruled itself by its magistrates, as the only reasonable and happy one, without considering the fact that a people must itself be virtuous if it is to elect virtuous magistrates’ (Grundtvig, 1812, 334). Such a constitution, claimed Grundtvig, could only lead to continuous, arbitrary revolution and the dissolution of both State and Church desired by Rousseau (Grundtvig, 1830, 280; cf. Grundtvig, 1831, 12). In other words, Grundtvig associated Rousseau’s social thought with revolution in a manner reminiscent of French Ultra-Royalism, without any of the qualifications or respectful dissociations of Rousseau from Jacobin practice found in the 1790 writings, even among his critics such as Tetens. Steffens’s and Grundtvig’s attacks on Rousseau had been parts of their total rejections of the legacy of the French Revolution. The latter rejection was challenged by the liberal writers of the 1830s and 1840s, who defended the ‘good’ revolution of 1789 representing human and civil equality while condemning the ‘bad’ revolution of 1793, that is, the principles of pure democracy and social levelling, in this respect taking up the tradition from the 1790s. However, to the new generation of liberals, Rousseau’s political thoughts were now associated with the ‘bad’ revolution. Some of the political theorists most important to the Danish liberals of the 1830s and 1840s, while carefully criticizing reactionary demonization of Rousseau, regarded

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his theories of the general will and sovereignty as a source not only of ‘despotism’ and ‘tyranny’ (Constant, 1980, 272, 503, cf. 186), but also an egotism ‘destructive not only of all government, but also of all society’ (Guizot, 2002, 288; cf. Craiutu, 2003, 131–3; Johnson, 1963, 38 and 54–8; Roussel, 1972, 489; Hegel, 1970, 3:431–41 and 7:400). Because of this association with the ‘bad’ revolution, there was now a significant absence of real engagement with Rousseau’s political thought among liberal writers. One of the rare occasions at which Rousseau was mentioned, a brief cursory remark made by a moderate liberal Hegelian historian, Frederik Schiern in a 1842 discussion of Danish and European ideas in the eighteenth century, may provide further evidence of this, since it is probably indicative of a widely shared attitude among his co-thinkers. Distinguishing two schools of French enlightenment thought, a ‘negative’ school of criticism led by Voltaire and a ‘positive’ school aiming at the transformation of state constitutions and led by Montesquieu, Schiern added in a footnote that Rousseau had not belonged to either school. Instead, Rousseau had ‘turned into a popular catechism what the new philosophy had hitherto only been taught to the higher estates’ and had praised republicanism rather than constitutional monarchy. This meant that Rousseau’s Social Contract ‘relates to Montesquieu’s studies of L’esprit de lois in the same manner as the French constitution of 1793 related to the constitution of 1791’ (Schiern, 1856, 167).10 In other words, Rousseau was now regarded an ideological source of radicalism and thus anathema to the political program of the moderate liberals. The emerging current of radicals did not disagree. In the absence of interest in his political thought among liberals, Rousseau was recruited as a hero of the marginal radical movement bordering on socialism, organized in Denmark during the 1840s with the daily newspaper The Copenhagen Post as its main organ (Stender-Petersen, 1978; Nygaard, 2009a). This was a redeployed Rousseau, however, interpreted through the prism of the French Revolution, German Left Hegelianism, French radicalism and early socialism, especially the historical writings of Louis Blanc.11 The Copenhagen Post critically aligned itself with eighteenth-century humanism in defending a ‘modern humanism’ suitable for the nineteenth century and rooted in the experience of the French Revolution. Citing Louis Blanc, it described two main strands of eighteenth-century humanism: an individualist humanism expressed in the thoughts of Voltaire and the egotism of the French bourgeoisie during the revolution of 1789 and a fraternal humanism of solidarity found in the philosophy of Rousseau and in the practice of the revolutionary committees of 1793. The modern humanism defended by The Copenhagen Post was explicitly rooted in the fraternal tradition of Rousseau,


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but avoided the terrorism, regimentation and purely negative tendencies of 1793 by means of a ‘positive’ acknowledgment of all human ‘inclinations and urges’. The latter point seems to have been derived from a critical encounter with the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier and his followers (Anonymous, 1844; Beck, 1845; Blanc, 1847b; Nygaard, 2009a, 356–61). So even though the moderate liberals of the 1830s and 1840s defended the ‘good’ revolution of 1789 which their political ancestors had considered in the light of a Rousseau respectfully admired, even when criticized, Rousseau had now become part of the philosophical defence of radicalism, associated with the Jacobinism of 1793 and elements of early socialism.12 Accordingly, for conservatives, Rousseau served as a scarecrow theorist of popular sovereignty in debates about the new Danish constitution in 1848–9. This use was rather scattered and marginal, however (Kolderup-Rosenvinge, 1848, xiii; Dirckinck-Holmfeld, 1848, 24–5; Stilling, 1848).

Beyond 1850 The marginalization of Rousseau’s thoughts in political life during the nineteenth century relegated the subsequent Danish reception of his political thought to high-level approaches. Even among university philosophers, however, Rousseau was treated rather scantily until the late 1870s, when Harald Høffding, professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen from 1883, became interested in his thought and ended up publishing a widely disseminated book on Rousseau in 1896 (Høffding, 1896).13 While not completely absent from political debate after 1850, Rousseau was no longer a main figure of an ideology or movement. He was invoked rather as fragmented echoes of the different receptions of his thought during the Age of Revolution. Thus, in the 1870s, Georg Brandes, the prominent Danish literary critic and proponent of new naturalist and realist principles to replace romanticism and idealism, did present Rousseau’s role in modern social thought and literature in much more nuanced ways than previously, but the elements of his analysis were hardly novel. Eager to associate Rousseau with the French Revolution, Brandes claimed that practically each paragraph of the Social Contract had been turned into ‘a law, a public declaration, a newspaper article, a speech in the National Assembly, or the constitution of the republic’ (Brandes, 1899–1910, 21).14 Yet, he emphasized the complexity of his subsequent role in French intellectual life: Far from being the irreligious revolutionary demonized by counterrevolutionaries Rousseau had possessed both religiousness and emotional sensitivity. This had allowed Robespierre to utilize Rousseauian thought ‘as

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a dam against the destruction of the emotional life once strongly attached to the tradition and authority of the church’ by erecting the cult of the supreme being. Similarly, this had allowed the milieu of writers around Madame de Staël to defend emotionality on Rousseauian grounds (ibid., 28–31, 59 and 265). While the ‘first stage of reaction’, comprising both of these strands, had thus ‘consisted in letting Rousseau lead the retreat’, it was only the second stage, the counter-revolutionary polemics of de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, that had led ‘the retreat against Rousseau’ (ibid., 59). While Brandes was sympathetic to Rousseau as part of an enlightenment project akin to his own late nineteenth-century project, he believed that Rousseau’s ‘highly defective’ political thought would threaten to undermine all government or lead to a dictatorship of the majority or to simple levelling rather than justice (ibid., 61). However, at a more general level, Brandes repeated the Blanc and Copenhagen Post distinction between Voltaire as founding the ‘the destructive principle’ of the French Revolution breaking the ‘principle of authority’, thus leading toward later liberalism, and Rousseau’s thought as ‘the unifying spirit’, ousting the principle of authority in favour of ‘the common feeling of fraternity’, thus paving the way for later socialism (ibid., 2 and 8). The latter conception may also explain one of the rare instances of deep admiration for Rousseau’s thought in Danish politics around 1900: Frederik Borgbjerg, one of the few intellectuals among the early Social Democrats, whose long-standing admiration of Rousseau’s thought, including his critique of private property, was often revealed in his influential political speeches, though never more elaborately (Sørensen, 1943, 24). In the broader Social Democratic movement, however, the role of Rousseau was negligible. Some Socialist and Social Democratic popular accounts of history from the 1880s did emphasize connections between Rousseau, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Malon, 1889, 84–5, and Bang, 1899, 255–63). But with the progress of consciously materialist conceptions of social development within the movement in the next two decades, such remnants of ‘idealism’ disappeared (Bang, 1945, 46–57; Jensen and Borgbjerg, 1904). In recent decades, Rousseau’s name has reappeared in public discourse as a staple of conservative political thought echoing the traditional counterrevolutionary demonizations. In 1996, the present (2010) Danish Conservative minister of culture, Per Stig Møller, who had looked to Bernard-Henri Lévy and other French anti-totalitarians for decades, included a chapter on Rousseau in his book The Natural Order. Concluding his presentation of the main writings of the philosopher, he condemned Rousseau as having


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‘invented’ [fundet på] the social orders of ‘Hitler and Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Kim Il Sung’ (Møller, 1996, 151). With significantly less scholarly appearance, Rousseau has recently been ritually demonized in parliamentary debate by two of the main spokesmen of the new extreme right, the priests Søren Krarup and Jesper Langballe.15 But characteristically, these are re-imported elements of older writings, particularly Grundtvig’s attacks on the Enlightenment and Rousseau, rather than an organically transmitted heritage.

Conclusion Thus, while Rousseau’s thoughts and writings did not create or supply the main elements for the modern political landscape in Denmark, it did contribute importantly to the formation of certain parts of this landscape at different points in time. Though the early reception of Rousseau from the 1750s on did not highlight his political philosophy, he was important in basic discussions about civilization, the state of nature and the origins of property. While two prominent writers from the academy of Sorø, Tyge Rothe and Jens Kraft, incorporated Rousseau’s critique of property as a subordinate element in their own writings, the main effect of such elements of critique in the broader educated public seems to have been a solidification of the established discourse in defence of property. A wider debate on Rousseau’s political philosophy gained foothold in the Danish public with the French Revolution. During this era, a more clearly differentiated landscape of political positions began to emerge through reflections on the revolution and its implications for political theory. This process of differentiation was closely connected with different attitudes toward Rousseau among the educated. Though the dominant public attitude toward Rousseau the philosopher remained respectful during the 1790s, even while rejecting the political excesses of the revolution carried out in his name, early admirers began pointing out weaknesses in his thought and explaining the course of the revolution by such weaknesses. Other voices were less discerning, whether by idolizing Rousseau as the philosophical hero of revolution or, less publicly, by condemning him as a rabble-rousing scoundrel. Moderate liberal criticism of Rousseau voiced during the Restoration era tended to strengthen such ideological divisions and Rousseau’s role within them. As a political public re-emerged in Denmark in the wake of the July

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Revolution in 1830, after three decades of political quiet, Rousseau was relegated to the extreme left wing, being rediscovered by a new radical political wing in the early 1840s by way of Louis Blanc’s socialist interpretation. This perception of Rousseau’s political thought as the philosophical ancestry of modern radicalism and, especially, socialism, and thus the association of Rousseau with new principles of revolutionary change, became a staple of Danish political discourse in the ensuing decades. Echoes of it can be heard even in current political debates, despite the lack of continuity in the Danish discussion of Rousseau’s thought beyond the mid nineteenth century.

Notes 1

The author would like to thank the organizers and participators of the conference on Rousseau and Revolution at Aarhus University in 2009 for providing inspiring discussions on this and other related subjects, and Nina Koefoed for sharing her comments on an earlier version of this article. 2 This interpretative framework of modern political culture and its relation to the modern problem of revolution has been developed through empirical studies and basic conceptualizations in an extensive body of literature. Some of the most important titles in this connection are Hobsbawm, 1973; Koselleck, 1979; Wallerstein, 1989 and Habermas, 1971. 3 This has only been mapped very roughly in the existing literature, cf. Holm, 1975a, 32–6; 1975b, 96–101. 4 Book editions included Botanik for Fruentimmere i Breve til Fru de L . . . , (1790 [two editions], 1803); Om Selskabs-Foreningen eller Grundsætninger i Statsretten (1795); Emil eller Om Opdragelsen, 6 vols., (1796–99); J. J. Rousseaus Bekjendelser eller hans Levnet, 4 vols., (1798); Den nye Heloise eller Breve fra to Elskende i en lille By ved Foden af Alperne, 3 vols., (1798–1801) + 1 vol. (1801, a shortened edition); Om Oprindelsen til Uligheden blandt Menneskene, og dens Grundstøtter, (1800). In addition, translations appeared in periodicals, including Minerva, 9 (1795), 342–75; Minerva, 10 (1795), 1–6; Samleren, 12 (1794), 371–91; Samleren, 12 (1797), 342–87. 5 Countess Charlotte Schimmelmann to Countess Louise Stolberg (b. Reventlow), January 9, 1790, in Bobé, 1900, 120. On Rousseau’s ideas in the salon culture of the era, cf. Sørensen, 1998, 152–3, 160–1, 414–15. 6 Cf. Danish translations Paine, 1793; Robespierre, 1794. 7 Cf. also the parallel criticisms of the French Revolution and Rousseau’s alleged rejection of civilization in the first two volumes of Johannes Boye’s treatise on the state, published in 1797 (Boye, 1797, 8, 13–14, 29). Cf. Koch, 2003, 287; Carlsen, 1953, 54–6. 8 This is analysed in detail from the perspective of a comparative Begriffsgeschichte in Leonhard, 2001. 9 Cf. a rare, brief exception: Telegraphen. Et Tidsblad, vol. 1, column 129–30 (1821). This journal of limited circulation was, however, in many regards a remarkable exception to the general de-politicization of the era as well as the anti-democratic, counter-revolutionary outlooks holding sway in public discourse.

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Cf. also his remarks on Marat as an eager, but superficially cultured ‘Rousseau involuted’, a ‘monkey of Rousseau’ (Schiern, 1857, 417). Some historical interest in Rousseau was also witnessed among the National Liberals, cf. the translated presentation of his life and thoughts in Girardin, 1847. On the role of Blanc in contemporary radical French receptions of Rousseau see Furet, 1997, 171–2). Cf. Blanc, 1847a, 9–12 and 458–63 and Loubère, 1956, 75–7. Cf. also the invocation of Rousseau as a precursor of communism in Sudre, 1850, 245–59, which appeared in a Danish translation. The part concerned with Rousseau was summarized in Müller, 1856, 419–20. It was later translated into at least German, English and Spanish. Cf. Sorainen, 1951, 377–83; Martin, 2006; Høffding, 1913, 120–61. By comparison, his predecessor had devoted little more than one page to Rousseau in his two-volume history of philosophy: Brøchner, 1874, 133–4. A brief, less specific connection between the Social Contract and the revolution as a struggle for freedom is found in a popular presentation of Rousseau and Émile from 1885: Trier, 1885, 14. Minutes of Folketinget, 23 January 2009, 24 April 2008 and 12 March 2002, accessed via www.folketinget.dk.


Part Three

Revolution and History


Chapter 8

Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order Christiane Mossin

Introduction This article will investigate the political philosophical issue of radical institutional creation. It raises the question of the possibilities of and conditions for creations of new social orders. Generally, we understand radical societal change retrospectively in terms of marked breaks in history. This is certainly the case when breakdowns of regimes, violent revolutions or civil wars are the issues of concern. But also radical institutional reforms are broadly thematized as instances of historical discontinuity, of a ‘before’ and ‘after’. However, when digging into historical details and complexities, often a much more muddled picture arises. Historical analyses bear witness to the fact that not only disruption, but also continuity plays a major part in the realization of new institutions: Often structures of power, ideologies and practices live on from a fallen regime into the next where they interact with the new ones under new names, in new shapes and constellations. Within the historical and social sciences, there has been an increasing focus has on the gradual nature of institutional change. In contrast, political philosophy predominantly privileges the perspective of discontinuity when raising and answering its core question – the question of the constitutional foundations of political order. This is equally true for universalistic, natural-right-inspired approaches and for power-oriented, constructivistic approaches. Constitutionalization is theorized in concepts differentiating between order and disorder, law constitutive and law sustaining violence/discourse/practices, between different paradigms or hegemonies of political order; or in concepts engaging in the idea of a self-constituting act. Philosophical theorizing on the foundations of political order does not have to presuppose the idea of a marked break in history, though. Historicalphilosophical approaches constitute an alternative to both universalism and

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constructivism. In my view, it is of crucial importance to develop further the potentials of historical-philosophical approaches in order to be able to raise the question of the constitution of order on historical grounds and to be able to mediate between the perspectives of universal ideals and power. No political order is founded purely on ideals or power; and no political order can create entirely by itself its founding resources. The issue is more urgent than ever. We are witnessing the manifestations of strong political intentions of institutional creation. In the Middle East and in Eastern Europe, Western countries engage in democratic institutional new buildings on the ruins of fallen regimes. Less radically, but still of significant importance, fundamental reforms of the welfare systems of Western European countries are being drafted these years. There is no sign that these changes will follow naturally from consensual collective forces. Resistance is immense, but in itself deeply fractionalized. There is no sign either, that violence alone – whether physical, economical or ideological – is capable of carrying out the intended institutional changes. In my view, political philosophy must engage into these difficulties and bind together on a theoretical level the questions concerning the possibilities of institutional change and those concerning the constitutional foundations of order. It must do this in order to make the crucial insights of political philosophy – into the ideal foundations of order and into the constructive nature of power – at all meaningful for us when confronted with the muddy dealings of real political creations. I believe that crucial conceptualizations of the possibilities and limitations of radical institutional creation can be found in Rousseau’s work. It is certainly interesting – and for the purpose of this article significant – that one of the most radical constitutional thinkers of the political philosophical tradition is also one of its most sensitive historical thinkers. In the following I will trace Rousseau’s reflections on the possibilities and impossibilities of radical societal change in his political and pedagogical writings. His insights do not follow straight forward, though, but appear fragmented and marked by ambivalences. My reading will be a parallel reading in the sense that it focuses on Rousseau’s particular reflections on the possibilities of change which appear mainly in between general institutional and historical considerations. It will be an aporetic reading in the sense that it will discern and interpret major dilemmas which can be found in the works, and finally, it will be a reading against Rousseau in the sense that it extracts from his conceptualizations insights which in some important respects undermine his declared intentions.

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The Dilemma of Creation: Destruction or Continuity? Can Rousseau be interpreted as an advocate for revolution? Often he warns against revolutions: ‘Once Peoples are accustomed to Masters, they can no longer do without them. [ . . . ] their revolutions almost always deliver them up to seducers who only increase their chains’ (Rousseau, 1997e, 115). Once repressed, human beings are incapable of liberating themselves; they will only seek new forms of repression. There is hope for repressed people, though; over time they might develop an understanding of freedom. But such developments will occur only over many generations and not by the forces of the peoples alone. The Roman people, representing in Rousseau’s view a historical ideal, was ruled so wisely as to be able to transform from a people stupidized from tyranny into a free people, worthy of its own political institutions (ibid., 115–6). However, the possibility of gradual liberation is denied to the already civilized European countries: Peoples, like men, are docile only in their youth, with age they grow incorrigible; once customs are established and prejudices rooted, it is a dangerous and futile undertaking to try to reform them; [ . . . ] a people can free itself as long as it is merely barbarous, but it can no longer do so once the civil mainspring is worn out. Then troubles may destroy it while revolutions may not be able to restore it [ . . . ]. (Rousseau, 1997b, 72–3) Civilization implies an inescapable logic of decay. It provides the powerful with tools for enhancing and legitimizing their power, in terms of science, rhetoric, division of labor and laws of property. The increase in inequality goes hand in hand with an increase in decadence: comparison, competition and calculation will capture the human relations and give rise to continuous developments of new desires. Once highly developed, the habits and tools of inequality and decadence cannot be reversed, even if society as such falls apart (Rousseau, 1997e, 158–72). There may, though, be reasons to suspect that this pessimism of Rousseau does not exhaust the matter completely. A continuous insistence on the reestablishment of the natural rights of the citizens in case of the government’s misuse of power can be found in his works. No doubt, Rousseau modifies this principle almost as often as he states it. But there are cases which leave no doubt: When the government uses its power to create ‘a state in the state’ (Rousseau, 1997b, 107–8) or when law has vanished and

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only power speaks (Rousseau, 1997e, 185–6), the citizens might still be forced, but no longer obliged to obey. This of course does not imply that a better political order will be constituted on the ruins of the failed one. But it is worth noticing that Rousseau presupposes a radical and never-ending political instability. Like civilization as such, political constitutions imply an inescapable logic of decay. Sooner or later the political means of justice – the laws and the institutions – will be used against justice (Rousseau, 1997b, 106–7). The body politic, just like the body of a man, begins to die as soon as it is born and carries within itself the causes of its destruction. But either body can have a constitution that is more or less robust and suited to preserve it for more or less time. (Ibid., 109) The radical logics of historical development presupposed by Rousseau undermine in my view the possibility of an exclusive conservative reading of his political works.1 Rousseau foresees a future characterized by ever new collapses and new establishments of political order – not only for historical contingent reasons, but for logical reasons as well. He does not welcome these collapses, but he considers them inevitable. While interpreting Rousseau as a theorist of radical political change, I do take his extreme pessimism very seriously. But I understand it as the expression of an extreme sensitivity towards the difficulties of change. Now, what are the characteristics of these difficulties, according to Rousseau?

A Simultaneous Constitutionalization of Political and Cultural Freedom As already indicated, political and cultural freedom are intimately connected. A good constitution helps very little, if people do not possess the spirits and customs necessary for using it. Rousseau uses the expressions of ‘suited’ and ‘ill-suited’: a people should be suited for its laws. If not, the laws will be disrespected, neglected and misused – and eventually overthrown (Rousseau, 1997e, 115; 1997b, 72 and 135–6; 1991, 468). In other words, Rousseau denies the possibility of a liberating potential in formal political freedom alone. Again and again he emphasizes the importance of considering the relationship between laws and culture. The forms of production and consumption, the degrees and forms of coexistence, the degree of wealth, the relationship between urban and rural districts, traditions, religion and love for the nation – all these factors and


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many more must be considered by political creators (Rousseau, 1997b, 73–5, 78–9, 100–4 and 139). New laws and institutions should not be simply adapted to existing cultural conditions. Rather, Rousseau envisions the possibility of a simultaneous constitutionalization of laws and customs: To these three sorts of laws must be added a fourth, the most important of all; which is graven not in marble or in bronze, but in the hearts of the Citizens; which is the State’s genuine constitution [ . . . ]. I speak of morals, customs and above all of opinion; a part [of the laws] unknown to our politicians but on which the success of all the other depends [ . . . ] particular regulations [ . . . ] are but the ribs of the arch of which morals, slower to arise, in the end form the immovable Keystone. (Ibid., 81) In other words, the most important law of the republic is the one which is really no law, but exists only in the hearts. And the most important customs are the ones that correspond intimately with the spirit of the constitution. Rousseau also deals with the matter in a more pragmatic manner. Laws cannot regulate customs, but laws do give rise to customs (ibid., 141). Certain laws receive his special attention, namely, the laws determining the art and content of education. They constitute some of the most powerful instruments of the constitution (Rousseau, 1997a, 189–93). The idea of the necessity of a simultaneous constitutionalization of political and cultural freedom raises the issue of time, or more precisely the issue of duration and continuity, in the core of the problematic of state creations. In other words, it raises the issue of historical continuity in the core of the problematic of political and cultural discontinuity. Laws might be given and overthrown in an instant, but customs are neither easily created nor destructed. In Rousseau’s view, the destruction of old customs represents the most serious problem: ‘What makes the work of legislation difficult is not so much what has to be established as what has to be destroyed’ (Rousseau, 1997b, 78). Establishing a new and good republic involves creations as well as destructions of customs. But is this at all possible, considering the slow, tendentially immovable, nature of customs? What must be considered the conditions for such creations and destructions?

Civilization or Barbarism? What people, then, is fit for legislation? One which, while finding itself already bound together by some union or origin, interest, or convention,

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has not yet borne the true yoke of laws; one with neither deep-rooted customs nor deep-rooted superstitions, one which is not in fear of being overrun by a sudden invasion; which without taking part in its neighbours’ quarrels can resist each one of them by itself, or enlist the help of one to repulse the other; one whose every member can be known to all, and where one is not forced to charge a man with a greater burden than a man can bear; one which can do without all other peoples and without which every other people can do; one which is neither rich nor poor, and can be selfsufficient, finally, one which combines the stability of an ancient people with the docility of a new people (ibid., 77–8). One does not need to reflect on these criteria for very long before the contradictions become manifest. Rousseau envisions a people without deeprooted customs and laws, but capable of military defense and diplomacy, selfsufficient in terms of production of goods and capable of ensuring that no man would have to be charged with a greater burden than he could bear. He envisions a people already bound together by some union – but bound without laws! And the final paradox: He imagines that such a stabile and well-functioning people would be willing to undergo deep political changes. I believe the contradictions can be summed up in a single dilemma: Should the establishment of a new and good order be based on an already existing solid fundament, in terms of social cohesion and economic, political and cultural capability? But if that is the path followed – we can call it ‘the path of continuity’ – then the new constitution would have to struggle with all the old customs that did not fit the new laws and risk being undermined by them. Or, should the new republic be based on a tabula rasa with respect to customs and spirits? No such tabula rasa situation has ever existed in historical time, and certainly not if we presuppose the existence of ‘a people’. Rousseau is perfectly aware of that, as will be clear in the following. The tabula rasa situation would be obtainable only through destruction of the already existing customs and spirits. But this path – ‘the path of destruction’ – would be faced with the extremes of creation and destruction. Everything would have to be invented and taught anew. In Rousseau’s opinion that would not represent the most serious problem, though: The destruction of the old customs and spirits would represent an even bigger difficulty and in many cases amount to an impossible task. I see this dilemma manifesting itself in his political works as such. At times he talks about the necessity of destruction. When discussing the flaws of the nascent governments, for instance: [ . . . ] having begun badly, time revealed its flaws and suggested remedies but could never repair the vices of the Constitution; it was constantly


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being patched; whereas the thing to do would have been to begin by purging the threshing floor and setting aside all the old materials, as Lycurgus did in Sparta, in order afterwards to erect a good Building. (Rousseau, 1997e, 175) But in his many analyses of the relationship between laws and customs, he often emphasizes the importance of continuity: The specific forms of government should be chosen on the basis of specific historical conditions, and new institutionalizations should use the resources of history and traditions (Rousseau, 1997a, 183–7 and 189–93). Rousseau’s works bear witness to the writer’s pronounced attention to the path of destruction as well as to the path of continuity. But he does not mediate them. It is either the one or the other. As such, each of them designates a dead end. Together they represent an inextricable dilemma. Rousseau’s description of the characteristics of a people suited for constitutionalization must be seen as a utopian ideal. It could even be interpreted as a speculation meant to demonstrate the extreme difficulties connected to radical change. As I see it, the ideal description demonstrates that there could never be a people truly suited for revolution. And it exposes the dilemma between continuity and destruction which permeates Rousseau’s work. But what if we turn to his examples of ancient peoples suited for revolutions?2 Does he not avoid the dilemma when analyzing these rare instances of ‘good revolutions’? It would seem so. He clearly analyses them in terms of destruction and not continuity. Destruction is possible, according to Rousseau, because the peoples in question are barbarous peoples, still not civilized. What he indicates is that there is not so much to be destructed. I find there is good reason to be careful with regard to this seemingly easy differentiation between barbarous and civilized peoples. It is clear from Rousseau’s own indications that the barbarous peoples in question do possess customs and spirits. Especially, he dwells on the phenomena of repression and slavery. Repression and slavery produce their own patterns of habits, legitimizations, needs and desires. The repressed get used to their chains; they might even love them and justify them (Rousseau, 1997e, 115–6 and 176–7; 1997b, 42–3). Rousseau’s analysis of the culture of slavery – directly opposed to those philosophers who believe that the mentality of a slave must be considered an expression of his or her nature – is in my view a refined expression of his general interest in the relationship between power and history. In connection to the issue of barbarism it is worth mentioning that according to Rousseau the interdependence of power relations and human self-understandings constitute one of the most distinct marks of civilization (ibid., 165–6; Rousseau, 1991, 83–4).

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If the barbarous peoples in question were not enslaved, they were soldiers. A people of soldiers, too, must certainly also be considered to be intrinsically determined by power relations and to have developed strong patterns of opinions, habits, needs and desires. Rousseau does at times, though, come close to presupposing a tabula rasa situation. He writes of Moses: [He] formed and executed the astonishing enterprise of instituting as a national body a swarm of wretched fugitives who had no arts, no weapons, no talents, no virtues, no courage, and, who, since they had not an inch of territory of their own, were a troop of strangers upon the face of the earth. (Rousseau, 1997a, 180) The tendency inherent in all of Rousseau’s descriptions of ancient peoples that underwent a fruitful revolution, is, that there did not really exist ‘a people’ before the constituting political act – but he is not consistent on the matter. Unlike in his general definitions which make it explicitly clear that the political constitution presupposes the existence of ‘a people’. Rousseau seemingly avoids the inexplicable dilemma of the path of continuity and the path of destruction in his descriptions of these ancient ‘good revolutions’, by assuming – inconsistent with his general indications – that the peoples in question were not really ‘peoples’, and that the customs and opinions they possessed were still not so civilized as to make their destruction impossible. He does not underplay, though, that even in these cases the task of destruction was immense. I do find it hard to point to a clear criterion in Rousseau’s works for distinguishing between civilized peoples, no longer capable of fruitful revolutions, and barbarous (or young) peoples, still capable thereof. Not even ‘law-making’ could be upheld as a criterion, since Rousseau suggests that the nascent governments should have been removed completely in order to clear the way for a new constitutionalization. One could make the point even more general: as soon as actual relations between individuals exist, then power relations also exist along with competition, comparison and battle. Civilization is at stake as soon as social relations are at stake. But if there does not exist a clear criterion for the difference between a civilized people and a barbarous people, then there does not exist a clear criterion for the suitableness or non-suitableness of a people for revolution either – considering Rousseau’s own qualifications of the phenomena of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’. What is left in Rousseau’s multiple, self-contradictory and at times almost absurd considerations on what would characterize a people suited


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for revolution is, in my view, the inextricable dilemma between the path of continuity and the path of destruction. This dilemma applies to both old and young peoples and to the more or less civilized. Rousseau’s apparent solution is of course really no solution: destroying the existing foundation completely – even if this foundation was barbarous – would mean establishing the new order in a void, with no resources to build on. The ‘body politic’ would be no body, but a pure formula: only formal political freedom. The historical examples of ancient ‘good revolutions’ are in their own way just as utopian as their theoretical counterpart: the coherent, stabile, independent and well-functioning people with no deep-rooted customs and laws. But do we need to end in an inextricable dilemma? In order to continue the investigation – and not be stopped by the dilemma – we need to take a closer look at that which must be created according to Rousseau: civic virtue.

Creations of Civic Virtue In Émile, Rousseau explains that there are two different kinds of education: Natural man is entirely for himself. [ . . . ] Civil man is only a fractional unity dependent on the denominator; his value is determined by his relation to the whole, which is the social body. [ . . . ] From these necessarily opposed objects come to contrary forms of instruction – the one, public and common; the other, individual and domestic. (Rousseau, 1991, 39–40) The contradiction is a tragedy: what is good for the human individual is not good for society and vice versa. It is Rousseau’s hope that the demands of nature and society could be realized in man without contradictions: If perchance the double object we set for ourselves could be joined in a single one by removing the contradictions of man, a great obstacle to his happiness would be removed. In order to judge of this, he would have to be seen wholly formed [ . . . ] the natural man would have to be known. (Ibid., 41) The purpose of Rousseau’s grand thought experiment is exactly to know natural man within society. Rousseau will educate a human being from birth to grown man, in accordance with nature, but still within society, in order

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to assess what a man, raised uniquely for himself, could possibly become for others (ibid.). The thought experiment succeeds: After completion of his natural education Émile eventually gives himself over to society with a clear mind and an unambivalent heart. Thus, Émile’s education turns out to be, in its own way, a civic education and the virtue developed in Émile an expression of civic virtue. However, civic virtue is also being dealt with from the perspective of society. In the political writings, as have already become evident, the issue of what is graven in the citizen’s hearts – morals, opinions and customs – plays a crucial part. In the following I will reconstruct, interpret and compare these two kinds of civic virtues. They can be defined by the same purpose: to give oneself to the common good. But the question is whether they are based on the same capabilities and dispositions of the individuals.3 In order to grasp the specific characteristics of the two kinds of virtue a clarification of Rousseau’s concept of ‘human nature’ is necessary. When defining and describing ‘the state of nature’, Rousseau makes it explicit that no human being has ever lived in such a state, and that his reasoning does not concern historical truth. What he wants to investigate into is the nature of man on the fictional premise that man had been abandoned to himself. Rousseau wants to know the nature of man without presupposing man as a social being. He criticizes Grotius, Locke and Hobbes for their inability to define a pure concept of nature: they all transfer to the ‘state of nature’ ideas they have taken from human society (Rousseau, 1997e, 132). Rousseau’s speculative concept of human nature is defined by both static and dynamic potentials. The concept of ‘a pure state of nature’ designates the static potential. Self-love is the only passion and self-preservation the only principle in the state of nature. The individual is pure self, physically and mentally independent from others. As purely asocial it is also purely amoral: The self-love is good in itself and good for the individual, but neutral in relation to others (Rousseau, 1991, 92). Furthermore, a complete concordance between desires and capabilities is presupposed. The individual only wants what it is capable of getting; it never imagines anything, never wonders, has no wild desires. It would never change at all were it not exposed to a pressure from the surroundings (Rousseau, 1997e, 142–3; 1991, 80). The dynamic potential of human nature which provides the basis for the break with the state of nature will be actualized only if such a pressure occurs. The dynamic potential is designated by the faculty of perfecting oneself.


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This faculty makes the process of civilization possible; it makes virtues possible as well as vices (Rousseau, 1997e, 141). It develops and transforms the natural passion of self-love. All passions are modifications of self-love and are in this sense natural, even if their sources are not (Rousseau, 1991, 212–14). What drives the faculty of perfecting oneself is the imagination which creates visions of objects of desire and thereby establishes a fundamental difference between desires and capabilities (ibid., 80–1). Likewise, imagination is a driving force underlying social interdependencies (ibid., 220–35 and 252–3). The two are intimately connected and enforce each other mutually. What must be emphasized on the basis of this brief sketch is the fact that human nature is fundamentally double-sided, disposed for both good and evil. The particular sources of depravation have their origin in society and not in human nature itself, but the material of depravation (self-love) and the dynamic faculty making the depravation of self-love possible (the imagination) is part of human nature. The logic of decay characterizing civilization must be understood as a defining characteristic of human nature as well. The concepts of ‘history’ and ‘nature’ are interwoven to a degree where the one cannot be understood without the other.4 Now, turning to the civic virtues, we must ask: What kinds of transformation of self-love are at stake? And what governs the forces of imagination?

The Civic Virtue of Émile: The Virtue of Necessity Émile is given a natural education, but that does not mean he is educated outside of society. Nor is he kept ignorant with regard to the scientific, economical, political and cultural progresses of mankind. He is, admittedly, educated in the countryside, close to the simple lives of the peasants and not the sophisticated lives flowering in the city salons. But his upbringing does in no way resemble a peasant’s life. He is occupied with pleasurable investigations into the nature of the world, driven by his curiosity. He is taught natural science, history, metaphysics and morals. He must know the mechanisms and principles of modern society: the money system, the industries and the political institutions. He must travel in order to compare the characteristics of different countries. Most importantly, he must learn to trust no authority and to gain and test knowledge himself. Émile is supposed to possess social mobility to an extreme degree. Since he is without prejudices and without habits (his education has been conducted in such a way as to avoid any regularity (ibid., 63 and 160), he will fit in everywhere and nowhere in particular. When fully formed, he will be able

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to talk to people from all parts of society. He will seem pleasant to people though a bit peculiar, like a ‘likable foreigner’ (ibid., 339). He will be able to change estate easily, even political regime (ibid., 194–5). In what way can this education be considered natural? It is natural in the sense that the two main and interconnected dynamic forces of human development, imagination and social interdependencies, are carefully controlled by the teacher in order to avoid the morally devastating consequences of their work. Émile’s education is driven by his curiosity and openness, but the teacher carefully sees to it that Émile will not seek out goals far beyond what it will be possible for him to reach. His imagination is continuously set in movement, and then inhibited. Likewise, the experience of social interdependence is kept from him for as long as possible. He is dependent, of course, but should not be aware of it. As a child, he is not allowed to develop any relations to other people, except for the teacher. His self-understanding must not be influenced by the opinions of others. In relation to the teacher, he must not know that he is subjected to power. The teacher must correct and control the child in such a cunning and manipulating manner so that the child never realizes the presence of authority.5 Eventually, when Émile is almost a grown man, he must develop feelings for other people. Now imaginations of a different sort than the controlled imaginations of his childhood are unavoidable: like ‘the loved woman’, ‘the friend’, ‘the nation’ and ‘mankind’. The teacher sees to it that Émile extends his self-love to other people gradually and safely. Out of these passions of love for others arise the voice of conscience and the notions of good and bad (ibid., 211–35). Émile becomes just, honest, generous and indulgent, polite and modest – and a faithful and good citizen. One is puzzled: what makes this sudden transformation of self-love into civic virtue possible, considering that the dangerous forces of imagination and social interdependencies are eventually no longer chastened by the teacher? There is hardly any unequivocal answer to this to be found in Émile, but I do believe that one feature stands out. As a child Émile learns to control the imagination through the experience of necessity; that physical objects are subject to constant laws of nature. As a grown man he realizes that there is no escape from society, no matter to which country he goes, no matter which life he chooses. He accepts his dependency as a matter of necessity. He gives himself to society as if society were a manifestation of natural law (ibid., 471–4). This solution has actually been prepared already in Book II: There are two sorts of dependence: dependence on things, which is from nature; dependence on men, which is from society. [ . . . ] If the laws of nations could, like those of nature, have an inflexibility that no man


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could ever conquer, dependence on men would then become dependence on things again; in the republic all of the advantages of the natural state would be united with those of the civil state [ . . . ]. (Ibid., 85) Émile relates to the interdependencies of society just as he relates to physical objects. His dedication to society is a dedication to necessity. This is, as I see it, his fundamental civic virtue, not love for mankind or the common good – although he has developed such passions. Rather, his dedication to necessity is what keeps his desires and imagination in place.6 Thereby, he can maintain his inner freedom, his critical judgement and open-mindedness. His imagination and desire will never overpower him and he will never be seduced nor enslaved by the opinions of others.

Civic Virtue from the Perspective of Society: The Virtue of Imagination Civil virtue as described from the perspective of society is on the contrary based on exactly those two forces which needed to be inhibited in the case of Émile: the imagination and social interdependencies. ‘[ . . . ] when each citizen is nothing and can do nothing except with all the others [ . . . ], the legislation must be said to be at the highest pitch of perfection it can reach’ (Rousseau, 1997b, 69). The perfect society is defined by the complete interdependence of the individuals. This means that power relations permeate everything and everyone. The individual’s self-understanding is inescapably interwoven with the opinions and recognitions of others. Complete interdependence is a necessary condition for a just society. Only on the premise that what each member does for the others, he does for himself as well, can the subordination of the individual will under the common will be justified. (Ibid., 50, 61–2) But from such complete interdependence and all-permeating power relations spring the most dangerous potentials of imaginations: fractions based on estate, region, religion, or other interests and views will most easily arise and tear the wholeness of society apart. The development of partial societies represents the most serious enemy of society according to Rousseau, in agreement with Machiavelli and Hobbes (ibid., 60 and 146). To avoid such depravations it is necessary to give a common bent to the passions of the citizens. Human government needs a more solid base than reason alone (Rousseau, 1997e, 181). Traditionally, religion has provided

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the base for political order. Rousseau demonstrates a highly political view on religion. He believes religion as such necessary: no political order can be upheld without the citizens’ belief in the sacredness of the laws and such beliefs can only be guaranteed by the belief in a powerful and beneficent divinity. But he consequently advocates a position of religious pluralism: any religion will do, except for those that exclude the legitimacy of others. Different religions are expressions of different human interpretations of divinity, none of them can claim truth only for themselves (Rousseau, 1997b, 142–51). The insistence on religious pluralism is crucial, in my view. First, religious pluralism is necessary considering the always slumbering danger of the emergence of partial societies. Churches are human political institutions. When powerful, they will threaten the unity of society. Only if religion and political power should coincide completely on an institutional level would this threat be overcome. Such theocratic institutionalization would correspond to traditional state buildings. Although efficient, the lies and deception, the vanity and not least intolerance of such institutional arrangements would make of the state nothing more than a tyrannical beast, in a constant state of war with all others (ibid., 147). Uniting state and religion represents no acceptable solution to the problem of partial societies. The only solution will be extensive religious pluralism. Secondly, the insistence on religious pluralism is crucial because it establishes the principle of non-concordance between the individual will and the common will within the core of civic virtue. This point is closely connected to the first one: If there are partial societies, their number must be multiplied (ibid., 60), says Rousseau, and ideally multiplied into the number of citizens. Difference is fruitful as long as it is difference between individuals, or at least differences that do not give rise to fractions. In fact, the non-concordance between the individual and common will must be considered an inescapable condition: If concordance should in fact exist, it would be a matter of pure coincidence (ibid., 57). But what constitutes the common foundation, then? Rousseau is very brief when defining his ‘civil religion’ in the Social Contract. It consists actually in nothing else but belief in divinity and justice as such, belief in the sacredness of the laws and religious tolerance. This could seem unsatisfactory. In other writings Rousseau considers the necessity of national institutions, ceremonies and education. But I do believe that the brief definition gives us the crucial points. The religious pluralism is in fact a pluralism of civil belief; Rousseau makes it explicit that religious and civil tolerance cannot be separated. The constitution should


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give a common bent to the passions of the citizens: give content and direction to their forces of imagination. But each citizen should interpret the sacredness of the constitution in his or her own way. This means that civic virtue from the perspective of society is fundamentally based on the individual powers of imagination. Since complete human interdependence is presupposed, these individual powers of imagination are at the same time necessarily dynamic social forces. In order to avoid the development of fractions, two kinds of continuous measures are necessary: to provide a common content to the passions of the citizens and to institutionally secure multiplicity. Both of these measures are primarily matters of positive creation: they give special fuel to the forces of imagination, rather than inhibiting them.

Controlling the Social Forces According to my reconstruction and interpretation, both kinds of civic virtues depend on control of the dynamic social forces. The connection between social interdependence and the human capacity for imagining and longing for something beyond immediate experience gives rise to the most dangerous developments of society. But this connection is also what makes society possible at all and the source of community, morals and love. The two virtues represent two different kinds of control. The first is negative: the dynamical forces are chastened by the belief that the manifestations of society resemble the manifestations of natural laws. The second is primarily positive: the dynamical forces are given new fuel and in this way specific direction and content. The first is based on the inhibiting principle of necessity, the second on passion and imagination. In my view, the two virtues are fundamentally different. However, that does not necessarily point to an invincible contradiction within Rousseau’ work. Émile is educated within the existing society on the premise that public education is impossible. The virtue of imagination on the contrary presupposes the existence of a just society. Rousseau allows the dynamical forces of imagination to flow only if and when a just society is established.7 Here lies I suggest, the answer to the inextricable dilemma between the path of destruction and the path of continuity. Rousseau considers social forces to be so dangerous that they can only be set free within an already established just society which gives content and direction to these forces. A mediation of destruction and continuity in terms of the transformation of

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existing customs into new ones would implicate the workings of collective forces of imagination as an intrinsic part of the constitutionalization itself. My interpretation of the two kinds of civic virtue indicates that Rousseau would not dare to let such forces free. But this means that Rousseau can only describe what the good society should be like. He cannot describe how to get there. The only civic virtue possible when a just society is not established is the virtue of necessity, inhibiting the collective forces to an extreme extent.

Conclusion Rousseau’s conceptualizations of the implications of institutional creation are disturbingly radical and inflicted by serious dilemmas; yet, precisely because of their consequentiality capable of opening up the complexities of the issue in a most powerful way. For Rousseau the questions concerning the possibilities of societal change and those concerning the constitutional foundations of political order are intrinsically connected. It has been my purpose to carry out a parallel reading focusing on Rousseau’s reflections on change rather than on his definitions of a just political order. But as has become clear, what drives the reflections on change is the constitutional perspective: of the ideal foundations of political order on the one hand and of power as an inescapable condition on the other. Rousseau continuously considers the historical conditions for the realization of both of these constitutional resources – without ever reducing them to such conditions or dissolving the delicate balance between them. When tracing the issue of change in Rousseau’s writings I was ultimately led to the question of the nature of human collective dynamics. His historical approach turned out to be inseparable from his anthropology: In the heart of his reflections on historical possibilities and impossibilities I found an incredibly dynamical understanding of what constitutes the social human being. I believe that important critical insights can be extracted from Rousseau’s radical logics of thought: He examines the limitations of political intentionality by pointing to the powerful as well as the impotent aspects of laws and institutions in terms of their ability to direct and control social dynamics. He introduces, thereby, the perspective of a muddy state in between order and disorder, consisting either in a legal order undermined by conflicting customs or in a cultural order where laws have crumbled. He introduces the perspective of old


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structures of power restoring themselves within new institutions. And most radically, he demonstrates that even what we consider states of barbarism do imply their own specific practices and legitimizations. As such they carry already the distinct marks of civilization. When Western countries today engage in institutional new buildings on the ruins of fallen regimes they implicitly reproduce the classical politicalphilosophical perspective of discontinuity: The existing social space is understood as defined by radical disorder, by anarchy and cultural void; and the challenge of creation is understood as the challenge of destructing anarchy and violence in order to reach a pure foundation for the new institutions. Such a tabula rasa conception is claimed by Rousseau as well with respect to the still uncivilized peoples. But it is undermined by his analyses of barbarism and civilization: Even the most violent and anarchistic social space does neither constitute a cultural void nor complete disorder. In contrast, welfare-state reformers in Western Europe presuppose order, rather than disorder. Here, the elements of destruction and latent disorder are downplayed: it is pre-supposed that radical institutional reforms can build on fundamental order in the sense of deeply rooted features of civilization. Only particular institutions and laws need to be destructed and replaced by others. In contrast to the tabula rasa conception which does not consider the latent order of disorder, the reformist conception tends to neglect the latent disorder of order. Does the reformist conception not in fact mirror in a more moderate form Rousseau’s utopian ideal of a people perfectly suited for legislation: a coherent, stabile, independent and well-functioning people with no deeprooted customs and laws? I believe in Émile to find the theoretical parallel to this ideal: Émile is like the utopian people: knowledgeable and good, but socially unengraved in terms of special opinions, customs and desires. In Émile the ideal is conceptualized to the extremes of its implications. The naturalness of Émile represents an ideal of autonomy. As I see it, Rousseau drives the ideal of autonomy ad absurdum. He demonstrates what an autonomous being would look like if logically thought through: fully educated yet without particular history, untouched by relations of dependence and recognition and desiring nothing beyond what can be grasped as manifestations of necessity. Furthermore, Rousseau shows that such autonomy is only possible to establish through the cunning works of a teacher, using deceptions and manipulations as a fundamental part of his method. There can be no sources for radical societal change found either in Émile or in the utopian people. Even if not utopian, they would gain their

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independence only through strong inhibition of fundamental social dynamics. They would never want to change anything. So, where are collective sources for radical institutional change to be found, then? Must we accept Rousseau’s pessimism: that collective human forces are fundamentally dangerous, – and must therefore be considered highly risky sources of creations and destructions of order? Even if we do listen to this pessimism, the intrinsic double-sidedness of it must be emphasized. Rousseau’s understanding of the nature of collective human forces is incredibly dynamical. Human beings cannot stop developing; they are restlessly driven by the workings of their imagination and interdependencies. This understanding certainly implies that human collectives do possess both the dispositions for and the capabilities of institutional creation. Human collective forces are fundamentally of a revolutionary nature – not in the sense that they are good, but in the sense that they are ever restless. The logic of decay assumed by Rousseau in relation to all social developments would seem to rule out the possibility that good institutional creations would ever result from the workings of collective forces. However, the logic of decay is only deterministic in the sense that it claims the continuous refinements of power relations, interdependencies and desires. Once it has been recognized that Rousseau’s differentiation between barbaric and civilized peoples cannot be upheld, the logic of decay dissolves into a multiplicity of particular historical logics, none of them determining any specific historical outcomes. What remains is the fact that any collective engaging in institutional creation will constitute in itself a muddy state in between order and disorder – just like the results of its creation.

Notes 1

Conservative elements can certainly be found in Rousseau’s writings (the political included) as will be clear in the following. For nuanced discussions on the uses and misuses of Rousseau by both revolutionary and antirevolutionary groups, see Swenson, 2000 and Thorup, 2008, 75–96. 2 There are three main examples: the Jewish, Spartan and Roman peoples. I do not discuss these examples in terms of the historical questions they raise. Here, I am only interested in the theoretical points that can be extracted from them. 3 The question of the possible reconciliation of the private and public virtue is thoroughly discussed in Gauthier, 2006 and Delaney, 2006.

Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order 4

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For a comprehensive, reflective reading of Rousseau’s understanding of nature as dialectical and historical anthropology (against the conventional standard opposition of nature and artifice), see Horowitz, 1992. An excellent discussion of the fundamental double-sidedness of human nature and the relationship between the static and dynamic potentials can be found in Muchnik, 2000. 5 Ruse and deception had to be used, Rousseau, 1991, 316. Émile is full of examples of all the imaginative tricks and theatrical performances the teacher must engage into in order to secure the naturalness of his student. 6 Horowitz (1992) emphasizes the denaturation and alienation which characterizes the education of Émile. But he concludes differently than I do: he sees in Émile a metaphor for a ‘higher synthesis’ of self and other, nature and history, passion and reason. 7 For a brilliant analysis of the incompability of the two kinds of virtue and the ultimate failure of both, see Gauthier, 2006.

Chapter 9

Rousseau and the Revolutions of the Earth: Remarks on a Natural Metaphor Antoine Hatzenberger

REVOLUTIONS DE LA TERRE, (Nat. hist. Phys. & Mineralogy) are what naturalists call natural events by which the face of our globe was & still is continually altered in its different parts by fire, air & water. See TERRE, FOSSILES, DELUGES, TREMBLEMENTS DE TERRE, &c. (Encyclopédie, Vol. 14, 1765)

Introduction Although the letter ‘R’ doesn’t stand for ‘Révolution’ in his Abécédaire – where it stands for ‘Résistance’ instead – Gilles Deleuze spent some time speaking about the idea of revolution at the letter ‘G’, under the headword ‘Gauche’ (Left). It is worth quoting at length what he said then, because it can, to a large extent, apply to what Rousseau wrote on the same topics. ‘That revolutions turn out badly makes me laugh’, says Deleuze, because, well, who are they trying to fool? When the Nouveaux Philosophes discovered that revolutions turn out badly . . . you really have to be a moron. They discovered that with Stalin! [ . . . ] After all, who on earth has ever believed that a revolution turns out well? [ . . . ] People say, “At least the English saved themselves the trouble of having revolutions”. This is absolutely untrue. [ . . . ] The English, they had a revolution. They killed their king, etc. And what did they get out of it? Cromwell. [ . . . ] All revolutions mess up [foirent]. Everyone knows that. The French Revolution produced Napoleon. The English Revolution produced Cromwell. What did the American Revolution produce? Something worse, wouldn’t you say? It produced Reagan [laughter]: that doesn’t seem all that much better to me. All revolutions fail. That revolutions go wrong . . . however . . . has never deterred people, or stopped them from becoming revolutionary.

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We’re getting two absolutely different things mixed up: situations in which the only solution for man is to become revolutionary [change of reel] This is confusing becoming and history. [ . . . ] Historians tell us about the future [ . . . ] of revolutions. But that’s not the point at all. [ . . . ] The real problem is how and why people become revolutionary. Fortunately, historians won’t prevent that. South-Africans are caught up in a revolutionary becoming. Palestinians are caught up in a revolutionary becoming. [ . . . ] The business of men, in situations of tyranny and oppression, well, it’s actually to become revolutionary, because there is nothing else to be done. When someone says later: “Well, it’s all going wrong . . . ”, we’re not talking about the same thing. It’s as if we were speaking two absolutely different languages. The future of history and people’s actual becoming are not the same thing. (Deleuze, 2004)

Revolutions: Rousseau’s Paradoxical Stance This is the very paradox that Rousseau himself emphasized. On the one hand, he made it clear, in the dedication of the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, that he was aware of the danger of revolutions which ‘almost always deliver [unfit peoples] up to seducers who only increase their chains’ (Rousseau, 1997c, 115). If Rousseau was not able to name Napoleon – nor Reagan for that matter! – he labelled Cromwell as a deceiving hypocrite (Rousseau, 1964c, 52, 438, 466). On the other hand, the conclusion to his Observations relative to the Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences stated that there are situations where ‘no remedy remains, short of some great revolution almost as much to be feared as the evil it might cure, and which it is blameworthy to desire and impossible to foresee’ (Rousseau, 1997a, 51). The foreseeability of revolutions has always posed a problem, as Deleuze was to note, but it seems that evil is sometimes the remedy. Revolution is needed as a last resort, but, in the end, the comparison of Rousseau’s different famous prognostications leads to the observation of something undecidable. Let us compare what Rousseau wrote in Émile : ‘the current order of society [ . . . ] is subject to inevitable revolutions’, ‘We are almost in a state of crisis, and the century of revolutions is imminent’ (Rousseau, 1969, 468), with this extract from the A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe and the State of War: ‘If our troubles cannot increase, still less can we put an end to them, seeing that any sweeping revolution is henceforth an impossibility’ (Rousseau, 1917, 50) and, finally, with the last words of his comments

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on Saint-Pierre’s project: ‘No Federation could ever be established except by a revolution. That being so, which of us would dare to say whether the League of Europe is a thing more to be designed or feared? It would perhaps do more harm in a moment than it would guard against for ages’ (ibid., 112). What this comparison shows is that the outcome of a revolution in the long run may be a matter of concern, but that the reasons and the signs of a revolution to come are another question. These two separate levels of interpretation that are thought by Deleuze to be necessary for a complete and adequate grasp of the idea of revolution are also required when reading Rousseau.

Rousseau and Revolution: Different Interpretations A certain ambivalence towards the idea of revolution seems to be a constant feature of Rousseau’s philosophy, and commentators have shed light on both aspects, positive and negative, in different parts of his works. For a time, very early on, it was common to consider Rousseau as a precursor of the French Revolution (see Mercier, 1791), but more recently, to summarize the two main interpretative trends of this particular issue, one might set those who have been scared by Rousseau’s revolutionary thought against those who think that Rousseau himself was scared by revolutions. On the one hand, some critics have emphasized Rousseau’s excessive radicalism and the supposed dangers of political schemes needing a revolution to be implemented. On the other hand, others have, on the contrary, stressed a certain pusillanimity in Rousseau’s preference for soft, progressive and peaceful social changes (in particular through education) rather than abrupt political alterations. Lester G. Crocker’s works on Rousseau are probably the most representative of the first kind of reading – following Karl Popper’s criticism of political violence and the enemies of the open society, and Jacob Laib Talmon’s thesis on totalitarian democracy. Anti-totalitarianism takes the guise of socio-psychological diagnosis when it denounces, as it often does, a ‘revolutionary’ mindset: ‘Rousseau’s personality was complex. He was an ‘anarchist’, writes Crocker, ‘or at least an outsider, in his own society. He was also a revolutionary, a Christ-like Legislator (in his fantasies), an authoritarian (in his thinking)’ (Crocker, 1968, 166). The second current of interpretation can itself be subdivided into two variations on the theme of the opposition between theoria and praxis. As


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C. E. Vaughan quite neutrally put it: ‘Bold even to recklessness in speculation, he was cautious, not to say timid, when it came to action. And he had a reasoned ‘horror of revolution’ which was but too likely to damp the fire of his zeal and, behind the golden dawn of brotherhood, to raise visions of the hatred and violence which might follow’ (Vaughan, 1962, 116). A more critical approach – often based on a Marxist perspective – also considers imaginative utopianism to be a way of escaping revolutions, and may be summed up by the conclusion of an article on Rousseauism as a ‘substitutive ideology’: ‘the nostalgia for the past or for another world’ is ‘the incapacity to imagine a revolutionary dawn’ (Biou, 1970, 127). How much did Rousseau praise revolutions, and how much did he condemn them? Was he revolutionary, anti-revolutionary, or revolutionary in spite of himself?1 Instead of deciding the absolute value of Rousseau’s idea of revolution, a more pragmatic approach would consist in trying to sketch out the different modalities of its effectuation.2 In so doing, we have to assume revolution as a mere fact. And the fact is – whether we like it or not – that revolutions do happen under certain circumstances. There is a strong necessity attached to the idea of revolution. Even though the idea of revolution is to be understood in a moral and political sense, hence its historical nature, its necessity has something to do with the inevitability of natural events. Rousseau noted down those revolutionary events that had occurred in the past, and made some attempts to predict radical changes that would probably occur in the future on the basis of both his anthropological observations and his principles of political right. If its consequences may indeed be unsure, be it a matter of worries or wonders, a revolution is nevertheless in itself the necessary consequence, or effect, of well-known causes. From this point of view, rather than a revolutionary proper, Rousseau would be more of a revolutionist. He describes how things, natural and human, change. He can be said to play the role of a seismograph, noting down and measuring the magnitude of the pressure and the social forces caused by the political oppression of corrupted governments. Revolutions are not judged, but analysed.

‘Revolution’: Definitions The Discourse on the Origins and Foundation of Inequality among Men is the narrative of those revolutions in which we can observe the effects of both neutralization and naturalization of the idea of revolution. In this second discourse, separate curves are drawn on the graphic formula of revolutions.

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On a first level, there are short waves: the ‘different revolutions’ of the forms of government that marked ‘the progress of inequality’ (Rousseau, 1997b, 182), the ‘brief and frequent revolutions’ in the balance of power (ibid., 186), and ‘the revolutions time will necessarily bring about in [the governments]’ (ibid., 184). If it is ‘from amidst [ . . . ] disorder and [ . . . ] revolutions’ that despotism gradually rears its ugly head (ibid., 185), however, ‘new revolutions either dissolve the government entirely, or bring it closer to legitimate institution’ (ibid., 182). As a whole, these continual variations form a periodic process and the Second Discourse plots a cycle when reaching ‘the last stage of inequality’, that is, ‘the ultimate point that closes the circle and meets the point from which we set out’ (ibid., 185). On a second level of continuousness, there are long waves that design a kind of ‘spiral movement’ (see Bergson, 1932, 311). The second revolution is the ‘great revolution’ (Rousseau, 1997b, 168) of iron and wheat that brought with it the dangerous consequences of private property, work and money, laws and social inequalities. Before that, there was ‘a first revolution’ (ibid., 164) that launched the period of beginning society, which ‘must have been the happiest and the most lasting epoch’ – and, Rousseau adds, ‘the least subject to revolutions’ (ibid., 167), in the latter sense of the term. These patterns correspond to the main definitions of the word in the Encyclopédie (Diderot, D. and D’Alembert, J., 1966, Vol. 14). First, in political terms, revolution means a considerable change that occurred in the government of a state (the single example given is the 1688 English Revolution and the usurpation by Cromwell caused by a rebellion). Secondly, an astronomical revolution is the course of a planet starting from a point and going back to this same point. According to a third definition, the revolutions of the earth are natural events by which the face of the earth was – and still is – changed in its different parts by the elements fire, air and water (the article cross-refers to floods and earthquakes).

Two Political Revolutions In the Social Contract, Roman history generally provides Rousseau with past models of political revolutions: ‘the revolutions of empires’ (Rousseau, 1997e, 127) and ‘perpetual revolutions of fortune’ (ibid., 131). There remain two particular cases, which are set out in the sequence of three chapters devoted to the people, and it is in these chapters of the Social Contract that the most precise presentation of Rousseau’s balanced concept of political revolution is given.


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The Russian Empire and the island of Corsica are two exceptions to the principle of the veil of ignorance regarding the future probability of revolutionary events. These contrasted examples illustrate the characteristics of revolutions that are infrequency and uniqueness (in grammarian terms, revolutions have both an inchoative and a semelactive aspect). Rousseau uses them as a dual system of example and counter-example to show that it depends on the moment whether a political change will mean times of trouble or whether it will lead to revolutions : such events are rare; they are exceptions the reason for which is always found in the particular constitution of the State in question. They could not even happen twice with the same people, for a people can free itself as long as it is merely barbarous, but it can no longer do so once the civil mainspring is worn out. Then troubles may destroy it while revolutions may not be able to restore it. (Ibid., 73) The first example of Rousseau’s exception to his rule of cautiousness occurs when he wrote that a Russian ‘revolution’ seemed ‘inevitable’ to him (ibid., 73). This prediction, that apparently caused Voltaire’s great amusement (Rousseau, 1964c, 1467, note 3), was based on the analysis of the context and the time of a political institution as well as the characteristics of the people to which it applied. The second example is given by the Corsican Revolution, to which Rousseau alludes in the last paragraph of these chapters on the people (Rousseau, 1997e, Book II, chapter 10). This example illustrates the positive definition of revolutions: ‘there may [ . . . ] sometimes occur periods of violence in the lifetime of States when revolutions do to peoples what certain crises do to individuals, when horror of the past takes the place of forgetting, and when the State aflame with civil wars is so to speak reborn from its ashes and recovers the vigor of youth as it escapes death’s embrace’ (ibid., 72). Rousseau shows elsewhere that this is what already happened in sixteenthcentury Geneva. Here, what makes the island of Corsica a land apart among all European states is ‘the valor and steadfastness with which this brave people was able to recover and defend its freedom’. Rousseau concludes chapter 10 of Book 2: ‘I rather suspect that this small island will one day astound Europe’ (ibid., 78). Rousseau uses the future tense in the Social Contract, although in reality the cause for astonishment had already happened. Rousseau thus utters a prediction a posteriori. The Corsican rebellion against Genoa took place

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in the 1730s and reached its climax with the constitution that had been promulgated by General Paoli and the assembly of the Corsican people in 1755 – the same year as the Second Discourse was published. As soon as 1751, Rousseau had taken an interest in the situation in Corsica, which he referred to as an ‘Island still smoldering from the ravages of the lightning’ in his Discourse on the Virtue Most Necessary for a Hero (Rousseau, 1997c, 311) – already making use of the natural metaphor that will be found again in the Social Contract. Later, he would proudly recall that he was the one who recognized the true nature of a great revolution in what at the time appeared to most as a mere ‘rebellion’ (Rousseau, 1965–98, 6673). In a separate fragment of the Constitutional Project for Corsica, Rousseau denounced what Roland Barthes was to refer to as the ‘axiomatic language’ of the colonial power (in the context of the decolonization wars in Africa), that is to say, a language aiming purposely to empty real situations of their true meaning (namely a state of war), in order to deny the very existence of the opponent (discredited and castigated as an ‘outlaw’ or a ‘rebel’) (Barthes, 1957, 138). Rousseau mocked the dismissive use of the word ‘rebels’ used in Genoese gazettes to refer to the Corsican people and spoke out in defence of both the specificity and the legitimacy of what should more accurately have been called a ‘revolt’ (Rousseau, 1964c, 942).

The Corsican Revolution The exact wording of the Corsican Constitution that stated that the people ‘having recovered its liberty’, by getting rid of Genoese rule, had become ‘legitimately its own master’ (Carrington, 1974, 510) recalls what Rousseau wrote in the Second Discourse about the illegitimate authority of the magistrate that would lead to a situation where ‘everyone would by Right revert to his Natural freedom’ (Rousseau, 1997c, 180). The Corsican revolution can therefore be counted as an instance of these ‘revolutions which restore things to the order of nature’ (Rousseau, 1997e, 102). What I would like to underline is the natural metaphor of the revolution of the earth at the core of Rousseau’s interpretation of the Corsican revolution. When putting together the ‘first revolution’ of the Second Discourse when ‘Revolutions of the Globe broke off portions of the Continent and carved them into islands’ (Rousseau, 1997c, 165) and what Rousseau designates in his Constitutional Project for Corsica as ‘the revolution’ by which ‘the nation broke its chains’ (Rousseau, 1964c, 91), it appears that it is only in 1755 that Corsica really became an island as such, by freeing itself from the oppression


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exerted on it by the continental powers of the Genoese Republic and the French Kingdom (see Hatzenberger, 2008). This point of view draws a parallel between the history of the earth and human history, that is to say that the revolt of the Corsican people literally had the effect of a political earthquake. It is such an act of geological secession that Rousseau’s Constitutional Project for Corsica was encouraging the Corsicans to reproduce at the scale of their island in order to create the material conditions for their autarky. By artificially perfecting their natural insularity they would institute themselves as a real society and create the genuine language of freedom. The Second Discourse’s hypothesis on the birth of society and Rousseau’s interpretation of the birth of the Corsican nation both seem to arch back on the same theoretical model of a natural revolution: that is to say, revolution as an earthquake or as a landslide. Rousseau stated in the Social Contract that ‘what makes the work of legislation difficult is not so much what has to be established as what has to be destroyed’ (Rousseau, 1997e, 78). That was exactly the case with Corsica in 1755. The island was in this rare and unique situation that allowed it to sustain the troubles without being destroyed. That is what Rousseau wrote in a letter to his personal Corsican penfriend Buttafoco: ‘Whatever care one takes to only make the necessary changes, such an establishment as we are working towards can never be achieved without a little commotion, and we must at least try to only have one’ (Vaughan, 1962, 359). A revolution can be a salutary crisis, but this is a one-shot solution. Nothing can prevent it, and nobody can exactly foresee it. But once a revolution has taken place, a new era has begun. Revolution means novelty and change; it leads to a renewal, the creation of the new. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: ‘Revolution is the absolute deterritorialization even to the point where it calls for a new earth and a new people’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991, 97). This is the precise meaning conveyed by the natural metaphor of the revolutions of the earth: in their ‘infinite movement’ (ibid., 96), revolutions are events by which the face of human societies was – and still can be – continually modified in its different parts.

Conclusion Images were then necessary to express precisely that, a necessity comparable to that of nature itself and the awe caused by certain changes. Metaphorical language is used by Rousseau the same way as he uses allegory – which was defined in the Encyclopédie as a ‘continued metaphor’. Although sometimes difficult to decipher, as the allegory of Prometheus that opens the Discourse

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on the Art and Sciences and its explanation by Rousseau show, and ideally clear or even sublime, as are the allegory of the revolutions caused by the discovery of fire and the metaphor of the revolution of the earth, they both have the same purpose of expressing a fundamental truth in the most forceful manner (see Hatzenberger, 2003). It is thus no surprise if Nietzsche took up the same metaphors associating revolutions and natural events and applied them to Rousseau himself. In the third of his Untimely Meditations, published in 1874, Nietzsche wrote that from Rousseau’s image of man ‘has proceeded a force which has promoted violent revolutions and continues to do so; for in every socialist earthquake and upheaval it has always been the man of Rousseau who, like Typhon under Etna, is the cause of the commotion’ (Nietzsche, 1997, 150–2). In Die Revolution, an essay on the history of the idea of revolution, published in 1907 in the wake of revolutions in which he took part and to which he devoted himself until his heroic death in 1919, Gustav Landauer defined revolution as social psychology. (Landauer, 2006, 14). The German anarchist mentioned Rousseau as a ‘social psychologist’, inasmuch as he felt that any social structure that happens to become unbearable and contrary to the freedom and the well-being of its individual members is doomed to destruction. It might well be in this very sense that Rousseau was revolutionary. Although he could only guess at the revolutions to come, and although he gave no guaranty whatsoever about the precise destiny of any particular revolution – but who can? – at the very least he stated their inherent necessity. Suffice it to say that this philosophy of history is by no means fatalistic, but presented the Corsicans, among others, with ‘great desires’, ‘great expectations’ and ‘great positive motives for taking action’ (Rousseau, 1964c, 937).

Notes 1 2

See also Crocker, 1994. Vargas, Y., ‘Rousseau: la révolution entre force et concept’.

Chapter 10

The Revolutionary Return of the Orator: Public Space and the Spoken Word in the Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Masano Yamashita

Introduction The genealogy of voice that Rousseau traces in his Essay on the Origin of Languages attests to an acute anxiety about the contemporary conditions of possibility for public speaking and to what the Genevan philosopher perceives as the progressive loss of voice of France. In the essay, the spoken word is conceived as a form of political participation: Rousseau gauges the political health of nations through the acoustic notion of vocality. In the narrative he fashions of the evolution of languages, Rousseau reminds his readers that in Greco-Roman antiquity, oral speech served as the safeguard of liberty and the garantor of the exercise of democracy. In so far as it was possible to directly address the people in a public space, the agora of classical antiquity provides for Rousseau an exemplary topology for civic eloquence that pointedly underscores its disappearance and salient absence in eighteenth-century monarchical France, where public affairs are decided under the auspices of ‘le Secret du Roi,’ Louis the XV’s secret diplomacy, and where deliberative rhetoric, in so far as it calls for a decision to be made by the public, cannot properly exist (Brassart, 1988, 7). The bond between speech and politics hence highlights the nature of commonwealths in their relationship to democratic principles and interrogates the possibility of open communication. The agora occupies a central place in Rousseau’s imaginary: it appears as an exemplary public space in which the very notion of community is consolidated and enacted. Habermas, in his work on the public sphere, indeed explains that ‘the public life, bios politics, went on in the market place (agora). The public sphere was constituted in discussion (lexis)’ (Habermas, 1991, 13). Diderot himself had underlined the importance of a direct, oral

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address to the collectivity in a letter to Necker dated the 12 June 1775: ‘Our writings only operate on a certain class of citizens, our speeches on all’ (Diderot, 1887, 69–70). In both his theoretical and fictional works, Rousseau observes the decline in eloquence and of orality by tracing an evolution in topologies for speech. Throughout his oeuvre the very possibility of public assemblies appears compromised. He claims in the Essay : ‘as there is no longer anything to say to the people but, give money, it is said to them with placards at street corners or with soldiers in their homes; it is not necessary to assemble anyone for this: on the contrary, the subjects have to be kept scattered; this is the first maxim of modern politics’ (Rousseau, 1998, 332). This historical reflection on the modalities of public address and voice appears as a common concern in the eighteenth century. Prior to Rousseau, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746) had also examined the temporal and geographical limitations on the possibility of an address to the collectivity by tracing the decline in the power of the spoken word, which had, according to Condillac, become progressively inaudible. He opposes the forceful traditions of Roman oratory to the present weakness and lack of accentuation of the French language: ‘We shall try to find out how the Roman orators who would harangue in the public place, could be heard from the entire people’. Condillac claims that ‘A Roman could therefore be heard distinctly in a public place wherein a Frenchman could only be heard with great difficulty, and perhaps not at all’ (Condillac, 1973, 332).

The Malady of Words In Rousseau the trope of illness emerges from these depictions of acoustic decline wherein the incapacity of the modern Frenchmen to make himself heard outdoors is presented as a symptom of political degeneration: Among the ancients it was easy to make oneself heard by the people in the public square; one could speak there a whole day without becoming uncomfortable. Generals harangued their troops; they could make themselves heard and did not tire themselves out. Modern historians who have wanted to put such harangues in their histories have gotten themselves laughed at. Imagine a man haranguing the people of Paris in French in the Place Vendôme. Let him scream his head off: people will hear that he is screaming; not a word of it will be made out. (Rousseau, 1998, 332)

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It is hence when language is rendered inoperative and intransitive, when it is no longer possible to address the collectivity in a public forum that the very notion of community comes under threat. It becomes, to borrow the terms of Jean-Luc Nancy, a ‘communité désoeuvrée,’ an inoperative community (Nancy, 2004). Underlying this diagnostic of vocal weakening is a socio-political reflection on the historical development of public spaces. For Rousseau, it is the counter-development in eighteenth-century France of enclosed urban spaces such as the salon that serves as the material cause of the loss of powers of the spoken word, and as a correlate, for the loss of democracy: Now, I say that every language with which one cannot make onself understood by the assembled people is a servile language; it is impossible for a people to remain free and speak that language. Ours are made for the murmuring in sultans’ Council-chambers (le bourdonnement des divans). (Rousseau, 1998, 332) The aesthetic meditations on voice and the inaudible chatter of the salons take on a historical dimension. The genealogy of spoken language contains, in this sense, a history of the different possible forms of government. It is indeed telling that the very last chapter of the essay on the origins of language, entitled ‘Relationship of Languages to Governments’ ends with an overt shift towards the political (ibid., 331). As Michel Delon has convincingly argued in L’idée d’énergie au tournant des Lumières (1770–1820), in an era in which the notions of the energy, the ‘chaleur’ (heat) and the ‘electricity’ of words become of widespread concern to writers and philosophers, Rousseau’s oeuvre attests to the widespread anxiety surrounding language, its communicability, possible erosion, and its modes of diffusion (Delon, 1988).1 Jean Paulhan in Les Fleurs de Tarbes had evoked the aesthetic crisis that arises when ‘le mal du langage’, the illness of words, makes itself manifest (Paulhan, 1990, 36). For Rousseau, the malady of language bespeaks more ominously of a moral, sexual and political crisis.2 Crisis here is to be taken in its etymological, medical sense: as the 1690 edition of the Furetière dictionary explains, crisis signifies ‘a judgment that a doctor makes of an illness through a symptom that occurs at the strongest point of the sickness, when Nature toils to rid itself of its bad humors; This crisis gave us great hopes; the crisis is an abrupt change in sickness, which either turns towards health or to death’ (Furetière, 1690). The crisis in language points here to a critical turning point, for better or worse, in an illness, the outcome of which can be answered perhaps only

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after Rousseau’s death, in the form of the resurrection of public speaking during the revolutionary assemblies.

The Spoken Word, or the Pedagogy of Voice: Space, Gender and Politics Rousseau engages in the idea of political reform through education. In Book 1 of Emile, he advocates for a pedagogy of voice. Opposing the vigorous, booming voice of children raised in the open fields of nature to the meek voice of the apartment-bound city child, Rousseau states that ‘the children of cities raised in chambers and under the wing of a governess only need to mumble to make themselves heard’, adding, ‘In the fields the scattered children, far from their father, mother and other children, practice making themselves heard from a distance’ (Rousseau, 1969, 295). The narrator comments: ‘Raised in the countryside in the rusticity of open fields, your children will take on a more sonorous voice; they will not contract the confused stammering of city-children’ (ibid., 296–7). A life lived outdoors is indeed crucial for Rousseau in so far as it is indicative of political liberty. In the Social Contract, he praises the Greeks for this very reason: In Greece, all that the people had to do, it did for itself; it was constantly assembled in the public square. The Greek people lived in a mild climate, had no natural greed, slaves did their work for them, their great concern was with liberty. (Rousseau, 1964a, 430–1) The development of French urban social spaces, and especially of the salons, is on the other hand considered by Rousseau as a sign of the effeminization and political decadence of France. In the Letter to D’Alembert the French nation is indeed figured as a denatured, ill and feminized body. Rousseau deplores that ‘every woman in Paris assembles in her apartment a harem of men more womanly than she is’, adding, ‘the women take great care in smothering their friends in well-enclosed chambers’ (Rousseau, 1995, 93). Engendering a crisis in sexual identity, the French mixing of the sexes produces an axiological confusion that makes the virtues of each gender indistinct from one another. In Book 5 of Émile, Rousseau had thus set forth to underline the benefits of a separation of speech into two distinct orders: one order of speech being the masculine sphere of civic, republican eloquence, which seeks to emulate on the public stage what Rousseau calls ‘the male eloquence of Demosthenes’, the other, belonging to the private


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domain, is ruled by the arts of conversation and ordered by ‘the talent of speaking’ of the opposite sex.3 In the Letter to d’Alembert, the agora is consquently rendered as an exclusively masculine space: The ancients spent almost their whole lives in the open air, either dispatching their business or taking care of the State’s in the public place, or walking in the Country, in gardens, on the seashore, in the rain or under the sun, and almost always bareheaded. In all of this, no women; but they were quite able to find them in case of need, and we do not find from their Writings and the samples of their conversation which are left to us that intelligence, taste, or even love, lost anything by this reserve. (Rousseau, 2002, 325–6) Rousseau elaborates a gendered critique of French monarchism, writing in the same letter: ‘Whether a Monarch governs men or women ought to be rather indifferent to him, provided that he be obeyed; but in a Republic, men are needed’ (ibid., 325). The frequentation of salons is rendered as a denaturation of man and the virile notion of the warrior’s speech, capable of stirring the courage of the crowd, is called to mind as a civic reminder of man’s duties in Émile: ‘A man who learned to speak in ruelles will be heard with great difficulty at the head of a batalion, and would barely be able to impose himself to the people during a riot’ (Rousseau, 1969, 296). This idea of a virile order of speech is taken up again during the revolution. Robespierre praises Rousseau’s language as demonstrating ‘a masculine eloquence’ (Robespierre, 1989). The rhetorical figure of the harangue and its centrality to both Rousseau and the revolutionaries draws attention to the gendered division of language. The harangue in the classical tradition is considered as a masculine trope par excellence; it is the rhetorical procedure favored in military contexts and used as a tool in warfare. Rousseau reminds us in the Essay on the Origin of Languages, ‘Generals harangued their troops; they could make themselves heard and did not tire themselves out’ (Rousseau, 1998, 332). As recounted by Plutarch, it was customary to harangue the troops amid the battlefields to revive the soldiers’ spirits and courage. Plutarch in the ‘Life of Demosthenes’ in such a way describes the effect of Demosthenes’ harangues on the Athenians: ‘the Athenians on the other side were still incensed and stirred up by Demosthenes’ daily orations; he did so solicit and persuade him, that he brought them all in manner to be against Philip. So that the army which their tribe should find at their common charge, was fifteen thousand footmen, all strangers, and two

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thousand horsemen, besides the citizens of every city which should also serve in the wars at their charge’ (Plutarch, ‘The Life of Demosthenes’, 57). Plutarch underlines the military effectiveness of Demosthenes’ speech, stressing his ‘authority of command’ and his action on the Thebans: ‘the great force of Demosthenes’ eloquence (as Theopompus writes) did so inflame the Thebans’ courage with desire of honour, that it trod under their feet all manner of considerations, and did so ravish them with the love and desire of honesty’ (ibid., 58). Through the practice of haranguing, virtue recovers its originary, root meaning of manliness. The intrication of eloquence and virtue appears as one of the main features of republicanism, which can be traced from classical republicanism to Rousseau, and from Rousseau to the revolutionary period. Robespierre in his apologies of Rousseau consistently evokes rhetoric and morality as inseparable components of Rousseau’s system of thought, lauding in his ‘Dedication to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ the ‘most eloquent’ and ‘most virtuous of men’ and then reiterating: ‘today, more than ever, we are in need of both eloquence and virtue’ (Robespierre, 1989, 81). Madame de Staël, in Lettres sur les ouvrages et les caractères de J.-J. Rousseau, likewise also praised Rousseau as exemplifying ‘the one who who knew how to make a passion of virtue, who consecrated eloquence to morality’ (Staël, 1788, 4). This double insistence on morals and speech is one of the key emphases of Plutarch’s biographies of great men. I would like here to specifically focus on Rousseau’s indebtedness to Plutarch in the formation of an imaginary and an ethos of public discourse. Plutarch’s descriptions of orators, namely, inspire in Rousseau a reflection on what it means to be a speaking subject and ignites a sustained meditation on the relationship between public discourse, subjectivity and the foundation of community.

Community and the Speaking Subject For Rousseau himself, the procedure of passionate identification that was begotten by his childhood readings of Plutarch’s biographies plays a key role not only in the formation of his political and moral ideals but provides the structural imprint for his various conceptions of the self as speaking subject.4 The civic ideal of a direct address to the crowd in Plutarch’s descriptions of Demosthenes, Numa and Lycurgus sets the stage for Rousseau’s own prise de parole as public participant in the collective affairs of the Republic of Geneva. The facility with which Rousseau is able to project himself onto the descriptions of these illustrious Greeks and Romans leads him to


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insert himself into the parallel equation. From the descriptions of doubles in Plutarch we are led to a triangulation of figures in Rousseau’s oeuvre: the Greek, the Roman and the Genevan. Rousseau’s absorption of Plutarch’s biographies thus leads him in turn to introduce a third element in the biographical configuration: the autobiographical subject of Jean-Jacques and his personal history centered around his native republic of Geneva. The literary play in time frames that arises from his appropriation of Plutarch’s biographies results in a telescoping of antiquity and eighteenth-century Geneva. In Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse Geneva is described as an anachronism, ‘a simple and free state where one finds Ancient men in modern times’ (Rousseau, 1961a, 60). In his theoretical discourses it is indeed the classical, Plutarchan figure of the orator that most saliently shape Rousseau’s selfimage as speaking subject. The emergence of the image of author as orator, haranguing his fellowmen to reform their morals and politics appears in Rousseau as a timely historical reminder to urge contemporary readers to reflect on bringing the spoken word back to the center stage of civil society. Writing in pre-revolutionary France for both Frenchmen and his native inhabitants of Switzerland – as attested for instance by the double address in the second discourse to both the republic of Geneva and the members of the French Academy of Dijon – Rousseau, by posing the question of the current possibilities of an agora and of a public forum for political debate, revisits the locus of antiquity in order to test the limits of contemporary discourses of nation-building and liberty. He namely turns to the figure of the legislator in order to formulate his hopes of regenerating and recovering the civic notion of community. In his Fragments politiques, Rousseau maps a ideal circle of statesmen among whom he positions himself as an alter-ego figure, writing that Lyurgus, Solon, Numa are my brothers. I come to rejoin my family. I come to taste at last the sweetness of conversing with my fellows, of talking and being understood. It is in your midst, illustrious souls, that I come at last to find my pleasure. (Rousseau, 1964b, 500)

A Theory of Reading: Identification and Selfhood Rousseau’s encounter with Plutarch engenders a veritable theory of the effects of reading. This encounter leads to nothing less than what Rousseau perceives as a reading revolution: described as a transformation of the soul,

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reading corresponds here to the Platonic idea of psychaogogia, presented by Socrates in Phaedrus as the formation or the leading of the soul through the art of rhetoric.5 Rousseau’s own reflections on the perlocutionary highlights the correlated phenomen of readerly identification and the elevation of the soul. One can recall for example Rousseau’s evocation of the projective dimension of his childhood readings of Plutarch: Incessantly occupied with Rome and Athens, conversing, if I may so express myself with their illustrious heroes; born the citizen of a republic, of a father whose ruling passion was a love of his country. I was fired with these examples; could fancy myself a Greek or Roman, and readily give into the character of the personage whose life I read; transported by the recital of any extraordinary instance of fortitude or intrepidity, animation flashed from my eyes, and gave my voice additional strength and energy. (Rousseau, 1959a, 9) To a certain extent, the structure of the parallel deployed in Plutarch’s biographies invites such a pattern of imitation. The biographical genre of the parallel involves a practice of literary portraiture conceived as pairs, doubles: the writer constructs a series of portraits presented as diptychs: focusing on one Greek and one Roman), Plutarch unfolds schemas of comparison, analogy and contrast. The parallels hence provide Rousseau with instances of ethopeias – moral portraits – and genealogies of the subject that pose descriptive questions of likeness and correspondence. It is uncanny to note how readers such as Robespierre also mirror, in their passionate identification to Rousseau himself, Rousseau’s own experiences of reading. As Claude Labrosse and Robert Darnton have noted, it is the intensity of the relationship to the reader that constitutes one of the main markers and originality of Rousseau’s oeuvre (Labrosse, 1985).6 But what does it mean to read, and what action does it have on a subject? According to Rousseau, the experience of reading corresponds to an instance of the sublime. We can recall that Hypsous, according to Longinus, indeed means ‘an elevation of the spirit or the soul’.7 In his short text entitled ‘Parallel between the two republics of Sparta and Rome,’ Rousseau evokes the transformational effect of encountering classical texts as an action on the soul: But I take pleasure in turning my eyes toward those venerable images of antiquity where I see men raised up by sublime institions to the highest degree of greatness and virtue that human wisdom can reach. The soul is


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raised up in its turn and courage is inflamed by wandering through these respectable monuments; in some way participates in the heroic actions of these great men, it seems that meditation about their greatness communicates a part of it to us, and one could say about their person and their speeches what Pythagoras said about the simulacra of the Gods, that they give a new soul to those who draw near them to obtain their oracles. (Rousseau, 1964b, 538–9, my italics) The self-constitution of Jean-Jacques as republican subject is hence cast in his works as a perlocutionary effect of reading. As a writer Rousseau must however negotiate the passage from an oral eloquence proper to ancient statesmen to the realm of books in order to experiment with the possibility of reaching the collectivity or a plurality of audiences in writing.

Writing as Mute Language First, writing appears as a figure of mourning that bespeaks to the loss of the practices of the spoken word and the disappearance (or displacement) of the public forum. Socrates in Plato’s Pheadrus had highlighted the nature of writing as a mute language, cut off from its author: Indeed writing, Phaedrus, doubtless has this feature that is terribly clever, and truly resembles painting. For the offspring of that art stand there as living beings, but if you ask them about something, they altogether keep a solemn silence. And likewise speeches do the same. [ . . . ] And when it’s been once written, every speech rolls around everywhere, alike by those who understand as in the same way by those for whom it is in no way fitting, and it does not know to whom it ought to speak and to whom not. And when it suffers offense and is reviled without justice it always needs its father’s assistance. For by itself it cannot defend or assist itself. (Plato, 1998, 275d–e, 86) The idea of writing as a form of mourning is indeed widespread in theories of rhetoric in the seventheen and eighteenth centuries where written speech is recurrently figured as a dead body. Bernard Lamy, in La rhétorique ou l’art de parler (1675) thus wrote on the opposition between orality and writing: The tone, the gestures, the air of the face of the person who speaks, support the words, and mark a part of what one thinks; thereby, in hearing

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one speak, one easily conceives what he trying to day. A written speech is dead; it is deprived of all these aids. (Lamy, 1998, 342) D’Alembert for his part, concurs almost a 100 years later in Réflexions sur l’élocution oratoire et sur le style en général (1763) by writing: ‘Eloquence in books is akin to music on paper, mute, null and lifeless; it loses its biggest strength, and it needs action to deploy itself’ (D’Alembert, 1763, t II, 322). The man of letters must then shift his attention to the variety of media that can be deployed in order to speak to the crowds and reflect on the modalities of the act of address: the question of deciding on a target audience, of determining whom to write for, appears with renewed urgency in the mid eighteenth-century. Rousseau’s reading of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, by instilling a sense of what he describes as the ‘sublime of heroism’, inspires in the philosopher a conception of writing as act of citizenry. Let us recall that the Letter to d’Alembert was conceived as an open letter, with a dual address simultaneously to the French academician d’Alembert and the people of Geneva: ‘Although I am addressing myself to you, I am writing for the people’ (Rousseau, 1995, 91–2). The back-and-fro from the writer figure to the one of orator furthermore attests to the slippage that appears to occur in the second half of the eighteenth century between the republic of letters and political republicanism. Toqueville writes in L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution of the new role of men of letters, devoting one chapter to the topic of ‘How, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, men of letters became the principal politicians of the nation and the effects that resulted from this’ (Tocqueville, 1968, Book III, chapter 1). Common to both forms of republics is the emergence of a public opinion as participant in collective affairs. Malesherbes in his 1775 reception speech to the Académie française remarks upon the emergence of a public forum for ideas and the new dominant trope of the writer as orator figure. Malesherbes explains: The public bears an avid curiosity towards objects which once before were most indifferent to him. A tribunal has arisen independent of all powers and that all powers respect, that appreciates all talents, that pronounces on all people of merit. [ . . . ] And in an enlightened century, in a century in which each citizen can speak to the entire nation by way of print, those who have a talent for instructing men and a gift for moving them – in a word, men of letters, – are, amid the public dispersed, what the orators of Rome and Athens were in the middle of the public assembled. (Malesherbes, 1775)


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A paradox nevertheless arises in the order of representations of speaking subjects in Rousseau’s œuvre: the discrepancy between Jean-Jacques as selfdescribed clumsy public speaker, as social misfit baptized l’Ours – the bear – by Madame d’Épinay and his closest acquaintances and the exemplification of the orator figure, which translates in terms of the self-portrayals of the subject as speaker into a theatricalization of Jean-Jacques as impassioned orator, a performer who inscribes in his works imaginary public stages for speech such as the court, the pulpit and the battlefield. The perceived discursive weakness of Rousseau as public speaker, which is comically recounted in the Confessions, the passage from the spoken word to writing, is finally transformed into a coup de force. His literary project of writing for the people of Geneva will take as its duty to revive the civic ideals of ancient orators. The intertext of Plutarch serves, then, to highlight for Rousseau the radical necessity for reforming the public sphere in the second half of the eighteenth century. In his figurations of address, Rousseau experiments in destabilizing the chronotopes of his works, aiming in a dual movement to reach both a universal audience and an ideal addressee of ancient sages. In the Discourse on Inequality he thus turns away from addressing his contemporaries to face an imaginary space of reception: As my subject concerns man in general, I shall try to use a language that suits all Nations, or rather, forgetting times and Places in order to think only of the Men to whom I speak, I shall imagine myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating the lessons of my Masters, with Plato and Xenocrates for judges, and the human Race for an Audience. (Rousseau, 1993a, 19) The traces of ancient eloquence recovered from Plutarch’s texts finally opens up for Rousseau an access into the imaginary, a fantasmatic space in which the yearning for public speech prefigures the revolutionary assemblies, wherein a Robespierre, a Mirabeau will at the close of the century take to the stage in a revival of the classical figure of the orator. However, even with the advent of the revolution still subsists a discrepancy between the classical direct mode of address to the people and the problem of representative democracy, in which the address to the people is mediated by its representatives. Condorcet points out to this shortcoming of revolutionary address in the Rapport sur l’instruction publique of 1792, underscoring the distinction between ‘Demosthenes, [who] at the public gallery, spoke to the Athenians assembled’ and the conditions of public speech of

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late eighteenth-century France on the other hand: ‘here we pronounce our speeches not in front of the people, but before its representatives’ (Condorcet, 1989, 108).

A Revolution in Language: A Lesson in Laconism The crisis of language that Rousseau witnesses in the eighteenth century also yields to a reflection on the political effectiveness of various historicized modes of speech. If the spoken word is seen to have lost its powers, and the chatter of the salons produced a kind of wasteful ‘babillage’– idle babbling – the economy and energy of the Spartans’ laconism appears as an exemplary political idiom. In the works of Saint-Just, laconism is set forth as a linguistic ideal: Saint-Just’s Institutions républicaines evoke the ideal education of children who would be ‘trained in the laconism of language’ adding, ‘Children will be raised in the love of silence and in contempt of rhetoricians’ (Saint-Just, 1984). This silent eloquence is furthermore described by the revolutionary as a political mode of governance, that is, an effective form of leadership: ‘It is impossible to govern without laconism’ (ibid., 2:504).8 Rousseau for his part opposes the volubility of Athenians described in Émile as the ‘blabbering Athenians’ to the Spartans’ concision of speech (Rousseau, 1969, 362). In the eighteenth century, this opposition between Athens and Sparta is often used to draw further attention to the likeness between Athens and France: Louis-Sébastien Mercier, in Le Tableau de Paris, writes that Paris is ‘the new Athens,’ an anti-Sparta (Mercier, 1989). The Spartan’s economy of words appears as the very manifestation of the masculine ideal of civic and virtuous conduct in speech. It is in such a way that Plutarch praises the brevity of speech of the inhabitants of Laconia under the legislation of Lycurgus. In the Parallel Lives, Plutarch notes the penchant for Lacedaemonians for the form of the apophtegm, explaining: They taught these children to speak in such sort, that their speech had ever in it a pleasant grace, and in few words comprehended much matter. For Lycurgus ordained [ . . . ] that speech in few words, without any affectation, should hold much deep and grave matter, wherwith the children being acquainted, after long silence, should be brief and pithy in their answers. (Plutarch, ‘The Life of Lycurgus’, 19) Sparta serves the privileged role of silent muse in Rousseau’ work; its laconism embodying a linguistic utopianism that reconciles sign and action. In his


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fragment entitled ‘Histoire of Lacédémone’ Rousseau describes the Lacedaemonians as ‘brave and virtuous in silence’ (Rousseau, 1964b, 545). The state of Laconia (Lacedaemonia), from which the term laconism originates, thus represents an ideal of discursive communication and, moreover, subtends an exemplary morality. It is in such a way that Plutarch writes in his biography of Lycurgus: ‘laconism is a philosophy’. Laconic eloquence is furthermore the political idiom that is proper to the legislator and to the formulation of laws. Sparta’s legislator Lycurgus is described by Plutarch as ‘short and quick in his talk’ (Plutarch, ‘The Life of Lycurgus’, 19). The concision and assertiveness of the rhetorical figure of the sentence – the maxim form proper to sentientousness – allows Rousseau to formulate the hypothesis of a language that would circumvent the rhetorical difficultites of argumentation. In chapter 4 of Essay on the Origin of Languages, which is devoted to imagining the state of language in its very first manifestations, Rousseau writes of this originary language that ‘Instead of arguments it would have sentences; it would persuade without convincing, and depict without reasoning’ (Rousseau, 1998, 296).9 The temporal (that is diachronic) and rational exigencies of argumentation are dismissed in Book 4 of Émile as an ineffective, impoverished mode of speech: ‘To always reason is the mania of petty minds. Strong souls have another language; it is through this language that one persuades and that one pushes to action’ (Rousseau, 1969, 645). The procedure of sententiousness allows for the elaboration in the social contract of a discursive ideal of assertion, of apodeictic, that would free itself from a persuasion based on the demonstrative procedures of reasoning. Moreover, the article ‘sentence’ in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie explains the implication of the term ‘sentence’ as signifying a definitive arrest, an arrest in language and temporality. The sentence, or aphorism, is the form of speech that puts an end to all other speech: Jaucourt explains that sentences ‘are considered as counsel, or to say it better, as arrests in matters of manners’ (‘Chevalier de Jaucourt’). The language that brings an end to other languages, that brings us to the brink of non-language and timelessness, such appears the vanishing point of Rousseau’s reflections on the genealogy of speech. The meditation on the erosion of the spoken word in the French traditions of public speaking activates in Rousseau’s oeuvre a new focus in education reform, a re-energized economy of language, and finally serves to conjure the revolutionary beckoning of the charismatic figure of the orator.

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Notes 1

On the prevalence of the concept of energy in the eighteenth century, see also France, 1999 and Chouillet, 1984. 2 Keith M. Baker (2001, 36) stresses the importance of the metaphor of crisis in republican discourse in his article, as revealing ‘the moment in which the very existence of the body politic hangs in the balance, in which it will either recover its health and vigor, or fall into an irreversible, fatal sickness, the moment in which liberty will either live or die. [ . . . ] thus the essential problem of classical republicanism was that of sustaining civic virtue, and with it the life of the political body through time. Hence the centrality in this idiom of organic metaphors: images of vigor and weakness, health and sickness, and life and death. Hence, too, the metaphor of crisis – the moment in which the very existence of the body politic hangs in the balance, in which it will either recover its health and vigor or fall into an irreversible, fatal sickness, the moment in which liberty will live or die’. 3 Elena Russo (2007) also highlights this gendered division in aesthetics by examining the antinomic symbolization of the social spaces of the tribune and the boudoir. 4 On the procedure of identification in Rousseau and its psychological and ideological ramifications, see Starobinski, 1957, 357 and Blum, 1986. 5 Socrates wonders: ‘Is not rhetoric in its entire nature an art which leads the soul by means of words, not only in law courts and the various other public assemblages, but in private companies as well? And is it not the same when concerned with small things as with great, and, properly speaking, no more to be esteemed in important than in trifling matters?’ (Plato, 1998, 261a–b, 68). 6 See also Darnton, 1984, 215–56 and Blum, 1986, especially 134–5. 7 See Caroline Weber’s (2003, 1–54, note 48, 243) explication of Longinus and her depiction of the aesthetic sublime in its relationship to Rousseau and revolutionary rhetoric. 8 For a more detailed commentary on Saint-Just’s laconic style of speech, see Carol Blum’s incisive study of revolutionary rhetoric. Blum comments: ‘Saint-Just’s peculiarly terse syntax, what Albert Camus called his “style guillotine”, was not peripheral to his vision of France but was an integral part of it. He put forth his ideas in a series of somber aphorisms, as if the words caused him pain. Saint-Just, like Rousseau, labeled verbosity the curse of the ruling class, the symbol of the vices of the ancien régime. The monarchy, “effeminately” garrulous, displayed its corruption in gushes of words.’ She then adds: ‘The stark language of the Institutions, marked by the present tense, short phrases with few dependent clauses, and a paucity of adjectives and conjunctions, was the stylistic manifestation of the Plutarchian political aesthetic that Rousseau had done so much to popularize. Saint-Just’s style, a striking example of this aesthetic, by the fact of its very existence reproached the specious vacuity of the aristocratic ideal’ (Blum, 1986, 188–9). 9 On the legislator’s language, one may also consult Kelly, 1987.

Chapter 11

Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic James Swenson

In 1798 Germaine de Staël composed a manuscript entitled ‘On the Present Circumstances that Allow the Revolution to Be Brought to an End and the Principles on which the Republic Ought to be Founded in France’. As the Directory lurched from crisis to crisis, Staël and her collaborator Benjamin Constant were concerned with the need to preserve the gains of the revolution – most crucially, in their eyes, equality before the law and juridical protections of individual liberty – by institutionalizing them in a ‘republican’ form of government (Stäel, 1979). Constant would later become famously agnostic with respect to differences between the forms of government – differences determined, in all classical accounts, in terms of the attribution of effective power to the one, the few, or the many – provided they guarantee individual rights. In 1797, however, the liberalism espoused by Constant and Staël can properly be called ‘republican’ in the sense that the republic is seen as the only regime structurally capable of safeguarding the liberty rights enumerated in the successive Declarations.1 Staël recognizes, however, that the Directorial regime is not yet a republic in the true sense. Indeed, the foundation of the republic requires that the revolution be brought to an end: this is precisely the thesis represented by her title. The constitutional regime is incompatible with the insurrectionary dynamic, which continues beyond the Terror in the alternation of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary destabilizations.2 The foundation of the republic thus requires the achievement of a post-revolutionary stability characterized by equilibrium between the institutions of the state and the ‘level’ of public opinion. The call to bring the revolution to an end is of course by no means unique to Staël’s manuscript; indeed, it is one of the great constants of the revolutionary decade. In contemporary historiography, the theme is primarily associated with the work of François Furet, first coming to prominence in the fiercely polemical essay, ‘The French Revolution Is Over’ (Furet, 1981, 1–79). Even as Furet rejected the ‘social’ interpretation of the revolution in

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favor of one centered around what we have come to call ‘political culture’,3 he identified the project of bringing the revolution to an end with the establishment of what we cannot help but call a ‘bourgeois-liberal regime’ that rejected the incarnation of popular sovereignty in the activist Parisian sections in favor of an individualist conception of rights, a robust executive, qualified suffrage and a defense of property. Furet thus described the project as taken up in turn by the Monarchiens, by Mirabeau, Lafayette, Barnave and the Lameths, by the Girondins after the September massacres and by the Directorial regime after Thermidor.4 It is an important contribution of Furet’s to have emphasized how early such a demand comes into play – by late July 1789, that is, from the moment that it became possible to distinguish between the revolution as a set of results and the revolution as a dynamic process. Indeed, every group that actually came to power during the course of the revolution considered it an urgent task to bring the revolution to an end. If the problem has a particular clarity after Thermidor (Baczko, 1994 and Brown, 2008) it is primarily because it holds the stage by itself; it had an equal if not greater acuity under the Terror (left-wing historiography has often held the Committee of Public Safety responsible for breaking the ‘popular movement’, see Soboul, 1971 and Guérin, 1977). Saint-Just’s theorization of the social conditions for the stabilization of the post-revolutionary regime in his Republican Institutions is, in key respects, similar to that proposed by Staël and Constant, notably in the unexpected priority he gives to what we now call ‘negative liberty’ (Saint-Just, 2004, 1089).5 Constant’s own terms, of course, were those of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ liberty (Constant, 1988).6 While he and Staël always maintained a deep and fundamental respect for Rousseau, the critique of ancient liberty as ill-adapted to the diversification of modern life and as founded on an exclusively martial and therefore impoverished – in all senses of the term – conception of both the polity and the personality of the citizen, is explicitly a critique of Rousseau’s analysis in the Social Contract and the influence of that analysis during the first 5 years of the revolution. Constant’s critique proposes that Rousseau’s analysis of the formation of the generality of the will in legislation, requiring the participation of the entire body of citizens, is functionally dependent upon his nostalgic evocations of the republican city states of antiquity. The implication is that the form of the general will inevitably leads to a lack of distinction between state and civil society and illiberal legislation that interferes in the private lives of ordinary citizens. In fact, as I will argue, the analytic of the general will and the thematics of the republicanism (ancient or modern) represent two distinct strands of Rousseau’s discourse that are irreducible to one another. They draw upon

Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic

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different discursive traditions and fulfill different conceptual (and ultimately political) functions. They are articulated with one another – we will in the end describe the Social Contract as a whole as the site of this articulation – but this articulation occurs on the basis of a distinction that draws on some of the most profound tensions animating Rousseau’s thought. We can begin to describe the nature of this division by remarking that the first two books of the Social Contract represent the properly revolutionary component in Rousseau’s writing. This characterization is first and foremost a historical fact: a core set of Rousseauian propositions played a crucial role in the unfolding of the revolution, notably in debates both in the National Assembly and in the press leading to the formulation of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the subsequent elaboration of the principles set out in the Declaration into a constitutional order. This is a minimalist claim. It does not mean that Rousseau himself was a revolutionary in any meaningful sense. It does not necessarily imply (nor does it exclude) that the ‘influence’ of Rousseau’s writing played a role in the preparation of the revolution. Finally, it does not require that theses drawn from the Social Contract played an exclusive or even preponderant role in those debates. In On Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution, I tried to show that the revolutionary effect of the reception of Rousseau’s texts during this period was less the inevitable result of his doctrine that than that of the unstable dynamic released by the impossibility of reconciling the full range of Rousseau’s theses (in particular, the tripartite characterization of the general will as inalienable, indivisible and unerring) with the demands of the concrete political situation (Swenson, 2000). The core of the demonstration can be summarized as follows: when arguing over the nature of their mandates, or when composing Articles 1, 3 and 6 of the Declaration of Rights later in the summer, the Constituants consciously drew a major portion of their conceptual vocabulary from the Social Contract ; indeed, key points of contention (this is clearest in the debates of September 1789 over the merits of the suspensive or absolute veto) are structured as a disagreement over the proper interpretation and application of Rousseau’s principles (ibid., 194–225).7 This pattern is repeated in every debate that concerns the nature of national sovereignty at least through Thermidor. It is not uncommon to find both parties at a given moment claiming Rousseau’s mantle.8 The key point that allows for Rousseau’s ‘influence’ to be isolated from the general currents of Enlightenment thought concerns the conceptualization of the ‘general will’ as requiring an exact coincidence of subjective and objective forms of generality, that is, a correspondence between the

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universality of the law (which is the sole determination of all uses of the term preceding Rousseau) and the participation of the totality of citizens in its formation.9 It was, in particular, these terms in which the conflict between constitutional and insurrectionary forms of revolutionary legitimacy was debated. Rousseau’s legacy was most often identified with the subjective side of the equation – that is, with an insistence on popular sovereignty – but his insistence that the general will can only speak in the form of law became, despite his refusal of representation, one of the pillars of government by assemblies. It is noteworthy that this debate can be, and indeed was, conducted on a relatively narrow textual basis. Indeed, the reduction of the core of Rousseau’s political thought to the first two books of the Social Contract – ‘taking Rousseau’s fundamental argument to be complete with the definition of the law,’ as Bruno Bernardi has noted – remains quite common and deeply influential (Bernardi, 2001, 23).10 In this context, we can characterize this section of the text in two congruent ways. Internally – that is, in terms of the logical articulations of the text – the object of Books I and II is the foundation of the political body; it is therefore the section of the text that could be and was used to justify the necessity for a complete re-foundation of the political order. Externally – that is, in terms of the discursive traditions or sources it draws on – we can define this as the domain within which Rousseau can be considered a theorist of natural right. The great study of Rousseau’s relation to the natural-right tradition, Robert Derathé’s JeanJacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, remains a definitive work after 50 years because its construction of the corpus upon which Rousseau is drawing is sufficient to understand the background to the most influential aspect of his argument (Derathé, 1988).11 Now, there is no sense in taking Rousseau as a representative of the jusnaturalist tradition. He radicalizes and transforms it in important ways, and it is in that radicalized form that these concepts are taken up by the revolution. But there is a fundamental agreement between this Rousseau and the natural-rights theorists he critiques – Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Burlamaqui and Barbeyrac, to whom we could add, on this point, Locke – as to the purpose of the exercise, namely, to define the conditions under which political obligation can be considered legitimate. These are the famous opening words of the Contract: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. [ . . . ] How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I believe I can solve this question’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 1). For Rousseau as for his predecessors in this domain, the deployment of the juridical vocabulary of right, contract and law corresponds to the promotion of legitimacy as the


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fundamental object of political analysis. It is Rousseau’s redefinition of legitimacy as requiring universal participation in the formulation of the law in which the ‘revolutionary’ character of his thought, in the somewhat simplified but very real and effective summary of it we are considering at the moment, consists. My contention is that there is nothing properly republican about this. Such a thesis aligns me with J. G. A. Pocock’s argument that the juridical language of rights and the republican language of virtues are fundamentally irreducible to one another, although they can be and have been combined in interesting and idiosyncratic ways (Pocock, 1975).12 In a narrow sense republicanism can be defined as opposition to monarchical rule (such a definition can be taken as the consequence of Montesquieu’s typology of governments in the spirit of the laws, for example).13 Rousseau’s definition of every legitimate state as a ‘republic’ harkens back beyond this limiting sense to the earlier usage, particularly evident in Bodin and harking back to the Latin term that takes ‘republic’ as equivalent to ‘state’. Rousseau certainly considers monarchical governments to be potentially ‘republics’ in the sense the term is used in the Social Contract, that is, legitimate when combined with popular sovereignty. Indeed, as Marcel Gauchet saw with particular clarity, one of the things that made Rousseau such an inevitable reference in the summer of 1789 was the possibility his system presented better than any other of reconciling popular sovereignty with monarchical government (Gauchet, 1989, xii–xiii and 28–35). More broadly, I would argue that eighteenth-century republicanism is a discourse that founds politics on an analysis of human capacities rather than on a postulation of natural rights. It can be expressed as the thesis that the capacity for ‘virtue’, that is, the capacity to participate in self-government, is sufficiently well distributed among men that distributed government is possible and desirable. I use the term ‘distributed government’ to indicate the variety of regime forms, from popular to aristocratic and democratic to ‘mixed’ that can and have been considered republican. ‘Sufficient virtue,’ however, is a mere possibility and republican thinkers generally – and Rousseau is no exception here – are a rather pessimistic lot. Republican discourse will thus develop primarily as a reflection on the precarious social conditions that foster and sustain the possibility of virtue. Classically, in the tradition that runs from Machiavelli through Harrington, primary among these conditions are the ownership of land allowing for economic self-sufficiency, and the possession of arms and the possibility of exercising them in collective self-defense. Republicanism is thus as much a way of life as a form of government. The first task of any republican government is to secure the robust

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independence of that way of life as the condition of its own perpetuation. A republic, that is, cannot view its self-preservation as a grasp upon power (elimination or co-optation of enemies, creation of a bureaucracy, etc.) but rather as the production through education and other ‘institutions’ of a national culture conducive to the cultivation of the capacity for selfgovernment. In order to demonstrate the importance of this sort of structure in Rousseau, I will turn to his construction of the way of life appropriate to two of the handful of actually existing republics in the eighteenth century: Poland and his native Geneva. The Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater can be characterized as one of the earliest articulations of the Romantic principle that ‘literature is the expression of society’ (Bonald, 1859, 3:975).14 Rousseau reduces the normative ‘rules’ that governed neo-classical theater to a single one: plaire, to give pleasure. Rousseau considers the theater primarily as a social institution and only secondarily as an invention of plots. A good play is a successful one and a successful play is one that flatters its audience by confirming the value of its dominant passions; a successful playwright expresses the desires of his audience much more than his own ideas. Lurking behind this idea is a sense of the theater as a purely national phenomenon. This argument on the necessarily national, culturally particularist nature of the theater corresponds to a structurally identical one about the necessarily particularist nature of good laws. In the Social Contract, Rousseau insists that there is no such thing as a best government. The best government is the one suited to a particular people and its situation: size, climate, fertility of soil, neighboring powers and no doubt national character (if indeed this is not reducible to the combination of the other, more material factors). On the whole, the institution of the laws is not such a marvelous thing that any man of sense and equity could not easily find those which, well observed, would be the most beneficial for society. Where is the least student of the law who cannot erect a moral code as pure as that of Plato’s laws? But this is not the only issue. The problem is to adapt this code to the people for which it is made and to the things about which it decrees to such an extent that its execution follows from the very conjunction of these relations; it is to impose on the people, after the fashion of Solon, less the best laws in themselves than the best of which it admits in the given situation. (Rousseau, 1968, 66) This is of course what makes legislation (and indeed politics in general) an art, just as theatre is an art. There are general principles that can be


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learned, but above all there is the intuition of the modification of the principles in the application to a particular situation. The problem, however, is that Rousseau here has stated why it is an art (why the application of principles is problematic and therefore intuitive), but he has not given us any particular insight into what guides intuition here. So before we can ask, what are the best laws for a given people, we might begin by asking, by what sign can we recognize that good laws are good (Rousseau, 1997e, Book III, chapter 9)?15 In the case of the theatre there was a simple ‘pleasure principle’, as it were, that performed this role: the theatre is either empty or full. When opening the discussion of the possibility of moralizing the theatre, Rousseau had explicitly opposed this pleasure principle to the coercive effect of legislation: I know of only three instruments with which the mœurs of a people can be acted upon: the force of the laws, the empire of opinion, and the appeal of pleasure. Now the laws have no access to the theatre where the least constraint would make it a pain and not an amusement. Opinion does not depend on the theatre, since, rather than giving the law to the public, the theatre receives the law from it. And, as to the pleasure that can be had in the theatre, its whole effect is to bring us back more often. (Rousseau, 1968, 22) While happiness is certainly a legitimate goal of government, it is impossible to simply make the pleasure principle the measure of good legislation. The body politic can be given will and force but not organs of sensibility proper to it; the individual can only feel his own good while that of the state is the object of public reason.16 But the possibility of a principle is here: the best laws do not function as laws in the strict sense, that is, as commandments and prohibitions that can be enforced, that rely on the threat of physical violence for their effectiveness. They operate instead through ‘the empire of opinion’: By what means can the government get a hold on mœurs? I answer that it by public opinion. When we do not live in ourselves but in others, it is their judgments which guide everything. Nothing appears good or desirable to individuals which the public has not judged to be such, and the only happiness which most men know is to be esteemed happy. (Ibid., 67) Rousseau goes on to give a detailed analysis of an example of how this might work: the proper use of the Tribunal of the Marshals of France. Rousseau’s

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argument here is that successive French ministries made a fundamental mistake in their efforts to repress dueling by relying on prohibition and punishment rather than opinion, honor and reputation alone; the means that should have been used ‘are neither laws nor punishments nor any sort of coercive means’. In order to function properly, the ‘Court of Honor’ would have to begin by accepting the existing principles of public opinion concerning honor. It therefore could not forbid all duels indiscriminately, but would have to allow them to take place when honor was truly at stake. Further, the monarchy would have to demonstrate not only that it was not interfering in the court’s judgements, but that at least as far as honor is concerned the court had jurisdiction even over the king (thus the anecdote about Louis XIV throwing his cane out the window, concluding with the typically Rousseauan touch of the ‘prize, which ought to have been a very simple but conspicuous mark, worn by the king throughout his life’ (ibid., 72)). Recognizing that honor cannot be forced, and first adjusting the law to correspond with accepted opinion regarding honor, it would then be possible to gradually become more and more exigent about duels that were allowed to go forward so that their frequency could eventually be reduced to near zero. Rousseau concludes this discussion with the comment: ‘With all of these precautions and other similar ones, it is very doubtful if success could have been attained, because such an institution is entirely contrary to the spirit of the monarchy’ (ibid., 73). This comment seems quite odd, at least to my ear, because the entire passage seems so thoroughly Montesquieuan, illustrating quite convincingly his contention that honor is the principle of monarchical government and that its effectiveness requires establishments of judgement independent of ministerial power. We can note in this respect that ‘public opinion’ as used by Rousseau in the Letter (and at least until the Dialogues) does not in the least indicate a Habermasian dynamic of rationalization; it has much more in common with the notion of reputation as it is found in the literature of baroque court politics.17 Further, Rousseau consistently associates living in the judgement of others – the untrammelled reign of amour propre – with the French monarchy above all other states. Now, it could be that Rousseau is disagreeing with Montesquieu about the true nature of the monarchy (or agreeing with him about the actual nature of French absolutism) and claiming that it is based on coercion rather than honor. But I think we must also consider the possibility that he considers this sort of ‘institution’ – he uses the word a number of times in these pages – to be more typical of or more appropriate for republican governments. The fundamental problem, I think, is that in a vast territorial monarchy ruled


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from an omnivorous capital, mœurs are not so much ‘bad’ as weak. Government by mœurs rather than by laws is only really possible in the republican city state where everyone knows what everyone else is doing (‘where individuals, always in the public eye, are born censors of one another’ (ibid., 59) and mœurs are strong. What this means above all is that the republic requires a particular form of institutionalization of amour propre. We will now look at how Rousseau proposes to achieve this in the Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Projected Reformation. Rousseau’s point of departure in the Considerations is what we can call the Polish paradox: from an objective point of view, Poland is a weak state, even absolutely weak. Its government is a completely dysfunctional anarchy. But Poland is subjectively strong. Convinced that they are free, the Poles effectively are free. Rousseau’s entire approach will be to respect this paradox. In the first place, this means privileging the subjective dimension of freedom with respect to the objective goals of the state. But it also means examining the question of what aspects of the objective situation – Polish anarchy – are in fact constitutive of (or at least essentially linked to) the subjective force upon which he hopes to build. This approach renders Rousseau’s reformism particularly cautious, as he continually warns against the loss of essential elements of freedom through hasty reforms. It also implies that we cannot conceive of Rousseau’s project in the Considerations as ‘utopian’. While he can be accused of being less than perfectly well informed about the reality of the situation in Poland, he cannot be accused of creating an abstract ‘best possible state’.18 The conservation of what works in the Polish paradox will in fact imply the preservation of a significant degree of irrationality. The most noteworthy example of this will be Rousseau’s attitude toward the liberum veto: condemned by all observers (at the time and since) as rendering Poland entirely ungovernable, Rousseau will characterize the ability of a single member of the diet to block legislation as a point of national pride that ought used as best it can. In the introductory section, Rousseau poses the question of providing an objective context for subjective freedom in terms of the hearts of the citizens. ‘No constitution will ever be good and solid unless the law rules the citizens’ hearts. So long as the legislative force does not reach that deep, the laws will invariably be evaded. But how can men’s hearts be reached? This is something to which our founders [nos instituteurs], who never see anything but force and punishments, scarcely give a thought, and which material rewards would perhaps achieve no better’ (Rousseau, 1997a, 179). As in the Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau calls for a positive and productive conception of law. This rejection of law considered primarily in terms of prohibition and

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punishment in favor of law as a system of moral rewards is the key to understanding Rousseau’s strategy throughout the Considerations. If a first principle deriving from the paradox is to change as little as possible, this second principle underlies every single innovation put forward by Rousseau. The reference to the blindness of ‘our founders’ on this point points to the distinction between ancient and modern politics. Rousseau identifies the ‘Spirit of the Ancient Institutions’ as consisting more in the encouragement of virtue than in the repression of vice. The law prescribes more than it proscribes; it presents the enticement of rewards more than threats of punishments. ‘So that in a wisely regulated state, the Law could say, like the priestess Theano: I am not the minister of the Gods in order to detest and curse, but to praise and bless’ (Rousseau, 1994c, 31). Rousseau gives a particular prominence in this text to Moses as the archetypal lawgiver since he conceives of the Mosaic Law as the prescription of acts to accomplish rather than the proscription of taboo objects to avoid. The God of Israel is one who preserves and maintains his people; it is the Christian God (in the Considerations) who is the vengeful punisher. Indeed, the situation of the Jews presents in Rousseau’s eyes an even more striking example of the Polish paradox, the survival of a people without a land (Rousseau, 1997a, 180). Lycurgus is similarly described as creating laws that demand an infinite number of duties to be accomplished and therefore continually occupying the citizens with them; Numa’s legislation likewise is described as essentially religious. The same spirit guided all ancient Lawgivers and their institutions. All of them sought bonds that might attach the Citizens to the fatherland and to one another, and they found them in distinctive practices, in religious ceremonies which by their very nature were always exclusive and national. (Ibid., 181) The exclusively national and religious character of ancient institutions is explicitly presented here as the solution to the initial problem of how to make legislation reach the hearts of the citizens. Insofar as they actively shape the tastes, morals, character and passions of a people, institutions link the feeling of personal identity with that of national identity. This unavoidable patriotism is the foundation of a passion for the general interest that is both the true final source of good laws and the only possible guarantee that the laws, whether good or bad, will be obeyed. Modern Europe, by contrast, is characterized by its homogeneity. ‘There are no more Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, even Englishmen, nowadays, regardless


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of what people may say; there are only Europeans’ (ibid., 184). The homogeneity of Europeans, for Rousseau, is strictly equivalent to their individualism, their pursuit of private interests over public interest and thus their hypocrisy. Their only ambition is the accumulation of luxury and wealth. Cosmopolitanism is an inevitable mask of self-serving hypocrisy, whereas patriotism is a necessary attachment of noble souls. We can summarize our reading of the notion of ‘institutions’ in the opening, theoretical chapters of the Considerations as a pair of interlocking propositions, which we shall call the principle of emulation and the principle of particularism. The principle of emulation posits that institutions, including morals, customs and laws, whether political, civil or criminal, should be primarily positive rather than prohibitive; they stimulate opinion rather than punish the body. They fulfill this function in that they organize emulation, that is, the action of ambition or amour propre toward worthy ends. The principle of particularism further specifies that in order for these ends to be properly political (rather than simply moral, for example), the institutions must be exclusively national in two senses: they direct emulation towards the good of the nation to the exclusion of other goals, and they are distinctly and particularly proper to one nation, differentiating membership in it from all others on the continuous level of daily practice and thereby forging an unity of personal and national identity. I have presented these two propositions as ‘interlocking’, and they generally are in Rousseau’s use of them. But this is not simply and naturally the case. The potential conflict between them can be most simply expressed by noting that imitation is a synonym for emulation, and is also the antonym for particularism. This potential conflict expresses itself as a tension within as much as between the two principles. In the first place, amour propre, the driving force of emulation, most frequently appears in Rousseau’s work as a negative principle. It is, in particular, the psychological principle behind the homogeneity of Europe, the hypocritical pursuit of self-interest and false distinction. Keeping its action directed toward worthy, patriotic goals promises to be a difficult task, one that can only be resolved by the genius of the legislator.19 Secondly, Rousseau repeatedly warns against imitating other nations in the creation of institutions; institutions that are good in their original context will not be good when transplanted, partly because they may not fit, and partly simply because they are imitated. He nevertheless makes extensive use of examples drawn from other peoples both as explanation and inspiration for his proposed institutions. Here it would then be necessary to be able to distinguish between the slavish imitation of other nations, productive of the homogeneity of the contemporary

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European scene, and the emulation of the spirit of ancient institutions. Once again, this distinction could easily collapse, and it is up to the legislator’s art to maintain it in practice. We do not have space here to discuss all of Rousseau’s proposals, and for the sake of efficiency we must limit our remarks to a brief consideration of Rousseau’s economics and somewhat longer treatment of his final proposal for a combination of a civil service competition and a broadly based program for social promotion. The chapter on economics begins by posing an alternative: does Poland wish to be a European nation or a republican one? The common path, the path of imitation, will lead to wealth, influence and luxury, but will make the people ‘scheming, intense, greedy, servile and knavish like the others’ (ibid., 224). The path of singularity, the republican path, will lead to none of this. Simplicity of morals and manners, agriculture and contempt for money will keep the Poles a people apart in but not of homogenized, Frenchified Europe. Contempt for and avoidance of money is the key to a virtuous economy. The fundamental problem with money here is that it is easily hidden. In part this means that fraud and theft are all too easy but the most fundamental problem with the secrecy of money is that it stands outside the system of emulation that Rousseau’s proposed institutions seek to embody. ‘Men can be moved to act only by their interest, I know; but pecuniary interest is the worst of all, the vilest, the most liable to corruption, and even, I confidently repeat and will always maintain, the least and the weakest in the eyes of anyone who knows the human heart well’ (ibid., 226). Just as the true defense of the republic is patriotism, its true treasury is honors. Monetary rewards are not as effective as symbolic ones since they are not ‘public,’ that is, visible enough; they do not ‘constantly speak to men’s eyes and hearts’ (ibid., 227). Rousseau’s economic thought here prefigures what Pierre Bourdieu was to call a ‘market of symbolic goods’ (Bourdieu, 1993).20 As is the case with Bourdieu, this is an effort to think a more general economy, to take the fundamental principle of economic thought – ‘interest’ or, more often with Rousseau and his contemporaries, amour propre21 – and see it as acting with equal or greater force outside the sphere of production, exchange, and consumption of commodities and accumulation of capital in the money form. Rousseau’s goal is to de-emphasize accumulation and luxury consumption among the Polish nobility in order to harness the force of amour propre for other ends – for the common good and glory of the state, to force the nobility to serve if it wants to shine. The point here is not to admire such noble, ‘disinterested’ ambition, but to make it the ethos of an entire society, to make it the objectively obligatory form of ambition for all. ‘Objectively


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obligatory’ means precisely that it is not experienced subjectively as coercion but indeed as the very form of freedom. This is the effect of mœurs, customs, habits and opinion. Organized in the form of institutions, emulation and amour propre become capable of serving the public good. The overarching institution that is to take on this task in a reformed Poland is what Rousseau calls a marche graduelle. There is no good way to translate this expression. Gourevitch mostly renders it as ‘system of graduated promotions’, which accurately captures the core of how it works, but doesn’t really translate the words. At other moments, for example, suivre une marche graduelle becomes ‘proceed gradually’. Marche designates a system of steps in a hierarchy (as in the marches d’un escalier), but also a general movement, a way of proceeding or functioning. Graduelle means both gradual and graduated. The idea of a marche graduelle is the fundamental form of an institution that will see to it that all Citizens constantly feel under the public’s eyes [ . . . ] and finally, that everyone, from the least nobleman, even the least peasant up to the King, if possible, be so dependent on public esteem, that no one can do anything, acquire anything, achieve anything without it. (Rousseau, 1997a, 238–9) Beginning as a sort of civil service hierarchy, ‘all members of the government’ will be subjected to this marche. There are three grades to the system, each marked by a badge – with an inverse relation between the value of the metal and the rank it denotes – separated by periods of ‘trial’. The system forces those who wish to participate in government to begin at the lowest levels of a service bureaucracy that culminates in qualification for Poland’s elective kingship. There are two aspects we should emphasize. The marche graduelle does not at first sight sit well with the principle of particularism. While the actual posts to which it is possible to be elected are all taken by Rousseau from the existing government of Poland, at the cost of clearer separations in kinds of office and some rearranging of their numerical proportions, the system itself, as embodied in the Latin titles of the ranks, is invented by Rousseau of whole cloth. More than anything else in the Considerations, the marche graduelle is an emphatically new institution. But it is at least invented by Rousseau and not imitated from France, Russia or England. If adopted, it would certainly be particular to Poland. Secondly, the marche graduelle so far only concerns the nobility, or the fraction of the nobility that chooses to enter public service. I think it is perhaps best understood in terms of Montesquieu’s typology of governments, as an

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effort to transform a monarchical nobility into a republican aristocracy. Rousseau combines the republican principle of equality, found inscribed among the Polish nobility in a number of existing institutions (such as the election of the king viritim, by individual vote of the entire nobility, or the liberum veto), taken here as an equal point of departure at the lowest level of the hierarchy, with Montesquieu’s concept of honor as the driving psychological force of a monarchy, embodied in the nobility from which it is inseparable, and expressed in ranks and distinctions. The form of amour propre put to work here is essentially the noble conception of honor. Acknowledging this restriction brings us to the second half of this crucial chapter, in which Rousseau attempts to abolish it. Both natural law and national strength require that participation in public life be extended to all Poles. Rousseau thus proposes as part of the marche graduelle a procedure for the gradual emancipation of serfs and ennoblement of burghers. Up until this point, ‘system of graduated promotions’ has served as an adequate translation for marche graduelle. In a sense this is still the case, with serfdom and bourgeoisie (Bürgertum, citizenship) now functioning as additional lower rungs on the ladder. There is no reason in principle why an emancipated serf cannot subsequently become an ennobled bourgeois, and so on. But the emphasis shifts decidedly toward ‘gradual procedure’ – in coming to terms with the second aspect of the Polish paradox, the principle of particularism becomes the necessity of slow reform. Rousseau emphasizes the difficulty involved: Nothing could be more delicate than the operation in question, for although everyone is sensible to how great an evil it is for the Republic that the nation should be as it were confined to the knightly order, and that all the rest, Peasants and Bourgeois, should count for nothing both in Government and legislation, such, after all, is the ancient constitution. Right now it would be neither prudent nor possible to change it all at once; but it might be prudent and possible to bring about this change gradually [d’amener par degrés ce changement], to see to it that, without perceptible revolution, the most numerous part of the nation grow attached by ties of affection to the Fatherland and even to the Government. (Ibid., 243–4) Rousseau emphasizes that it is essential that emancipation be perceived as an honor (and perhaps also as a material advantage) for the former lord, and that the comités de bienfaisance that award emancipation should have no punitive or coercive power. They are thus a pure instance of the notion of institutions as a means of organizing emulation even as they work to profoundly


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change the constitution (in the old sense) of society, that is, the composition, nature and health of the body politic. In closing the discussion he returns to the slowness of the process, emphasizing that it can be ‘speeded up, slowed down, or even halted’ as conditions warrant (ibid., 247). This sort of gradualism is fairly unusual in Rousseau’s work. The form of conservatism we have emphasized is not only opposed to abrupt change but also suspicious of change in general. The sequence of historical stages in the Discourse on Inequality is notable for the difficulty Rousseau has explaining transitions between stages. Rather than the interaction of mutually reinforcing factors working slowly over the long term, as one typically sees in the Scottish school,22 Rousseau tends to see a sort of chicken-or-the-egg problem that paralyzes ‘progress’ and ought to allow for the status quo to be maintained indefinitely.23 Both the state of nature in the pure sense and the so-called golden age preceding agriculture form coherent totalities that man need never have left and that he would not have left without the intervention of external factors. Rousseau attributes the end of both these states to geological catastrophes or ‘Revolution[s] of the Globe’: floods and earthquakes that create islands, volcanic eruptions that introduce the idea of metallurgy (Rousseau, 1997b, 165 and 168). In the Essay on the Origin of Languages Rousseau will even speak of a divine finger changing the axis of the earth’s rotation and thereby introducing seasons into a world that had previously known none (Rousseau, 1997d, 273). The gradualism of the Considerations is situated at the intersection of the principle of emulation – based on the action of amour propre, which so often appears as the hidden, insinuating motor of slow, even imperceptible but negative change – and that of particularism, which requires that the utmost respect be paid to the already existing customs, habits and institutions of the Polish people. Rousseau’s gradualism, that is, his promotion of reform over revolution, is the culmination of his effort throughout the text to present a realistic, non-utopian and non-revolutionary approach. Rousseau, for example, advises the Poles to leave the governing personnel of the existing regime in place. Never shake up the machine too brusquely. [ . . . ] Since it is impossible to create new citizens all at once, one has to begin by making do with those there are; and offering their ambition a new avenue is the way to incline them to follow it. (Rousseau, 1997a, 259) He is working here with an anthropology (or psychology, if you prefer) that is certainly optimistic in its estimation of human capacities but not utopian.

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He looks not for a change in human nature but for a gradual, socially reinforced redirection of amour propre, the source of what is both best and worst in us. We have thus established the presence of an important non- (although not counter-) revolutionary republicanism in Rousseau. It is explicitly gradualist and reformist, concerned about the loss of liberty with sudden change. It is clearly accepting of a significant degree of social inequality, even if it seeks to reduce it in the long term. It operates most forcefully by harnessing a highly aristocratic version of amour propre to public service. In general terms, it sees its tools as those of encouragement, honorific incitements, pride and emulation and avoids coercion and punishment whenever possible. It seeks to substitute public opinion and mœurs for the action of law as such. In the Social Contract, the principle of such an approach is stated most explicitly in a famous passage on the ‘Classification of the Laws’. After distinguishing political, civil and criminal law, Rousseau adds a fourth kind, the most important of all; which is not graven in marble or in bronze, but in the hearts of the Citizens; which is the State’s genuine constitution; which daily gathers new force; which, when the other laws age or die out, revives or replaces them [les supplée], and imperceptibly substitutes the force of habit for that of authority. I speak of mœurs, customs, and above all of opinion; a part [of the laws] unknown to our politicians but on which the success of all the others depends; a part to which the great Lawgiver attends in secret, while he appears to restrict himself to particular regulations which are but the ribs of the arch of which morals, slower to arise, in the end form the immovable Keystone. (Rousseau, 1997e, Book II, chapter 12) This text forms the transition between Books I and II of the book, dedicated to the production of a revolution in natural rights theory and the definition of the notions of legitimacy, sovereignty and the general will, and the pragmatic orientation of Book III, which defines the various types of government and sketches out the dynamic by which governments inevitably usurp sovereignty, and Book IV, which proposes a republican solution in the sense we have just developed. Book IV, in its concern with ancient Rome, is the least read section of the text. If the great penultimate chapter on civil religion has always garnered substantial critical attention, the important chapter on censorship that precedes it has not.24 It is in these chapters that the republican project we have traced in the Letter to d’Alembert


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and the Considerations makes its appearance. Books I and II, then, contain the ‘revolutionary’ Rousseau; Books III and IV the ‘republican’ one. This distinction between the halves of the Social Contract involves not only the diversity of objects they treat but more fundamentally their orientation toward modes of political action and temporality. It requires us to take account of a fundamental identity between revolution and legislation. Revolutionary action, in the first place, is defined not by the destructive moment of revolt or insurrection but by the creative moment of legislation. At the same time, Rousseau’s refusal of a privileged status for ‘fundamental laws’ (what we would today call the constitution) in the face of the absolute freedom of the people lawfully assembled requires us to recognize the fundamentally ‘revolutionary’ character of each and every act of legislation.25 The general will operates in a pure present and is constrained by no tradition; it is limited by its own nature (‘the general will, to be truly such, must be so in its object as well as in its essence [ . . . ], must issue from all in order to apply to all’ (ibid., Book II, chapter 4), but it recognizes no prior law that it cannot legitimately overthrow and recreate. Republican temporality, as we have seen, is to the contrary that of the slow movement of custom and long-standing tradition. What is perhaps unique to Rousseau’s construction is that neither of these temporalities is valorized to the exclusion of the other. This is no doubt connected to the sequence in which they occur. Counter-revolutionary thought conceives tradition as primary and original, grounded in nature or God; revolution comes upon tradition from the outside and disrupts it. For Rousseau, when it is a question of politics, it is always the revolutionary moment that comes first, in the convention of the social contract itself or the action of the legislator. The republic builds tradition on top of that original moment; mœurs ‘supplement’ the laws. The concept of supplementarity, which Derrida developed in a famous analysis of Rousseau (Derrida, 1974), is the key to the relation between mœurs and laws and a whole series of related oppositions, among which is that between the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns. Rousseau’s analysis does not lead to an opposition between an active, participatory liberty and a negatively defined absence of constraint on personal prioritization of choices. On the one hand, it seems to me that Rousseau was in fact willing to accept relatively low levels of actual political participation on an on-going basis. The idea that a good society needs few laws implies that the sovereign assembles rarely and does little, and that a great deal of leeway is left in between to the government. On the other hand, he insists repeatedly that the protection of civil liberty and private

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property is the primary purpose for which individuals come together in the social contract. Rousseauan virtue is not grounded in a substantive higher good and the public interest is derived from the calculus of private interests. The pertinent opposition here is rather between government by laws and government by mœurs. The ancient republic represents the vision of a society in which laws have been entirely absorbed into mœurs. In the Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau gives an account of the relation between law and mœurs in Sparta: The first function of the Spartan ephors upon taking office was a public proclamation in which they enjoined the citizens not to observe but to love the laws, so that their observation would not be hard. This proclamation, which was not an idle formula, shows perfectly the spirit of the Spartan régime [l’esprit de l’institution de Sparte] in which laws and mœurs, intimately united in the hearts of the citizens, made, as it were, only one single body. But let us not flatter ourselves that we shall see Sparta reborn in the lap of commerce and the love of gain. (Rousseau, 1968, 66–7) The identity of law and mœurs produces a state in which obedience is naturalized. The citizen of the ancient republic – the Spartiate or Roman – does not obey the law out of fear of punishment. He acts as he does because that is how Spartiates or Romans act; indeed, he need have no consciousness of following a law. Objective conformity to social norms of behavior is subjectively experienced as freedom itself. This pattern obviously exists under nonrepublican regimes as well: there is no society without internalized social norms of behavior that individuals perceive as the form of their freedom, and no sociology without a theory (of ideology, habitus, etc.) to describe its effects. Rousseau would by no means grant that the power of social norms to produce uniform behavior through the action of amour propre was any less powerful in the Paris described by Saint-Preux in Book II of The New Heloise. If monarchical society, however, can be said to be without mœurs (or to have ‘bad’ or ‘weak’ mœurs) it is because they are opposed to the laws, rather than reinforcing or naturalizing them. This in turn means that the laws appear as merely coercive; the element of freedom that must also be part of the law has disappeared. In the modern republic that Rousseau attempts to construct in texts such as the Letter to d’Alembert and the Considerations on the Government of Poland mœurs are neither opposed to nor identical with the law; they are its supplement. They naturalize social constraint and thereby allow the law to appear in the element of freedom. What this requires in particular is the recognition of the difference in temporality


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between the two modes. We can illustrate this final point by means of a brief consideration of the relation between mythical figure of the lawgiver and the ultimate institutionalization of mœurs, the civil religion. It is well known that the first draft of the chapter on civil religion was composed by Rousseau on the verso side of the pages of the Geneva Manuscript dealing with the lawgiver. That first version seems to represent an expansion of two canceled paragraphs at the end of the chapter concerning ‘the contribution of Religion to the civil establishment’.26 While he follows Vaughan in printing this distinctly rough draft after the end of the clean copy portion of the manuscript, Derathé hypothesizes that ‘Rousseau had originally intended to put it following the chapter on the lawgiver’ (Rousseau, 1959–95, Vol. III, lxxxix). In the Social Contract itself, however, the two chapters are separated by more than half the volume, with the ‘Civil Religion’ coming just before the conclusion. Why should this be the case? In thematic terms, the figure of the mythical lawgiver is a defining element of the republican tradition. Rousseau’s treatment of the lawgiver here, as in the opening pages of the Considerations, draws directly on Machiavelli’s Discourses. Machiavelli like Rousseau draws a close connection between the foundation of viable states and the foundation of religions; this is why both treat Numa Pompilius rather than Romulus or Servius Tullius as the true founder of Rome.27 But in terms of the structurally organization of the Social Contract, the lawgiver is indeed a revolutionary figure and belongs in the first half of the book. His action is complete and instantaneous, producing a properly revolutionary change from the situation that preceded his appearance. He appears as the solution to the same sort of logical circle in which cause presupposes effect that characterized the discontinuous temporality of the Discourse on Inequality. The lawgiver solves the circular blockage according to which only good laws can make a people wise and virtuous, but only a wise and virtuous people can make good laws, in the same way that a volcanic eruption revealed metallurgy and seemingly instantaneously introduced the division of labor. Most importantly, the lawgiver has no place in the republican order he seeks to found, and the requirement that he exile himself like Lycurgus is quite literal (Rousseau, 1997e, Book II, chapter 7). If he attempts to remain in the state and hold office, he will hasten the inevitable usurpation of sovereignty by the government, and what he tried to create in secret in the form of mœurs will promptly degenerate into punitive law. In a fundamental sense, the withdrawal of the lawgiver corresponds to the need to bring the revolution to an end in order to found the republic.

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The civil religion as described by Rousseau is in fact not a protototalitarian nightmare. It appeals to the Lacedaemonian ideal of the complete identity of law and mœurs but also distances itself from it in crucial and effective ways. The ‘exclusively national’ religions of the ancients (and not merely of ancient republics) is the inspiration for the civil religion but is no longer possible; the civil religion is necessarily modern, a result of the profound transformation of religious experience introduced by Christianity. This transformation involves not only the perversion introduced by Christianity – the distinction of a ‘spiritual kingdom’ from the earthly one and the inevitable rise of clerical power in opposition to the state – but also and more importantly the truth of universal fraternity (ibid., Book IV, chapter 8).28 Under the ancient state religions there was an equivalence, not so much in principle as in uncontradicted practice, between conquest and conversion. The appearance of Christianity introduced the phenomenon of religious persecution; it also made necessary what Rousseau calls the ‘negative dogma’ that proscribes not only civil but also theological intolerance: Now that there no longer is and no longer can be an exclusive national Religion, one must tolerate all those which tolerate the others insofar as their doctrines contain nothing contrary to the duties of the Citizen. But whoever dares to say, no Salvation outside the Church, has to be driven out of the State [ . . . ]. (Ibid., 151) Theological tolerance is the consequence, perhaps even the logical equivalence of the fact that the political community and the religious community can never exactly coincide. And if these two communities cannot coincide, then neither can law and mœurs. The integral determination of mœurs by law and that of law by mœurs are both figures of unfreedom. Mœurs are the supplement of law and not its foundation. In a well-constituted republic, each domain is experienced as a realm of freedom with respect to the other.

Notes 1

On the notion of ‘liberal republicanism’ in the Thermidorian period see Jainchill, 2008. 2 This analysis first appeared in Benjamin Constant, ‘Des réactions politiques’ (1998); see Constant, 1998. 3 See in particular the proceedings of a series of bicentennial conferences organized by Furet in collaboration with Keith Michael Baker and Colin Lucas in Baker, Furet, Lucas and Ozouf, 1987–1994.

Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic 4

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Furet developed this generalized form of the analysis most explicitly in his last major work on the revolution, Furet, 1992. ‘The people’s liberty is in its private life; do not disturb it’ (Saint-Just, 2004, 1089). In fact this distinction already appears in Staël’s Des circonstances actuelles (Stäel, 1964, 129): ‘In the present era liberty means everything that protects citizens’ independence of the government. The liberty of ancient times means everything that ensured citizens the largest share in the exercise of power’. Constant and Staël’s historical analysis was given its current form – the opposition of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ liberty – by Isaiah Berlin (2002, 166–217).The most developed reading of Rousseau as proto-totalitarian, derived from this analysis, is Talmon, 1952. On Rousseau and the 1789 Declaration, see Gauchet, 1989 and Wright, 1994. On the debate on the veto, see Grange, 1969; Baczko, 1988 and Baker, 1990, 252–305. Roger Barny has emphasized the diversity of ‘Rousseauisms’ during the revolution in a series of publications; for an overview see Barny, 1974. On the history of the concept of the ‘general will,’ see Riley, 1986; and more recently Bernardi, 2006. On the particular point that concerns us here, Bernardi’s critique of Riley represents a shift on emphasis. I argue in Swenson, 2000, that the question of what ‘Rousseau’ meant to the revolutionaries – indeed, of why the Social Contract could assume for them the importance it did – requires a much wider consideration of his œuvre, notably including the Émile and The New Héloise. An important recent contribution to the study of Rousseau’s relation to jusnaturalism is to be found in the consideration of the incidence of specifically Genevan debates in Rosenblatt, 1997. For a particularly explicit statement on the relation between the language of virtues and the language of rights, see Pocock, 1985. Pocock’s construction of this history is silent on France; for an overview of the possibilities of such a history see Baker, 2001. An entirely opposite orientation, which identifies republicanism and natural right, underlies the majority of contributions in Belissa, Bosc and Gauthier, 2009. See Sonenscher, 2007, 150: ‘in a sense the modern distinction between republics and monarchies could be said to have begun with Montesquieu’; see also Shklar, 1993 and Wright, 2007. The principle is shared by Romantics of all political stripes; the principle (if not the precise phrasing) underlies Staël, 1964, 139–256. Rousseau refers this question to the equally straightforward criterion of population. See the draft of the Social Contract known as the ‘Geneva Manuscript’, Book I, chapter 2, in Rousseau, 1997e, 154–5. On the concept of public opinion in Rousseau’s work, see Senellart, 2002 and Bernardi, ‘Rationalité et démocratie: une autre généalogie du concept d’opinion publique’. For presentations of the Considerations as utopian by scholars with significant expertise in Polish history, see Baczko, 1989, 43–70 and Wolff, 1994, 235–83. For a reflection on the importance of the positive functions of amour propre in Rousseau, see Cooper, 1999.

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A crucial moment in the formation of Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital is the analysis of honour in Kabyle society in Bourdieu, 1997. In Montesquieu: Pouvoirs, richesses, et sociétés, Céline Spector shows that Montesquieu’s conception of the ‘market’ mechanism of the production of an ‘involuntary convergence of particular interests in the public interest – what Smith would soon after call the ‘invisible hand’ (Spector, 2004, 17) occurs not with respect to wealth but honour in Montesquieu’s analysis. On the relation between the moralist analysis of amour propre and the economic concept of interest, see, most recently, Force, 2003. See, for example, Smith, 1979, 1:24: ‘The division of labor [ . . . ] is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature [ . . . ] to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’. See also Ferguson, 1995, 174, and my discussion in Swenson, 2000, 75–84. The clearest example (precisely because it serves to illustrate the general point rather than occupying a particular moment that needs to be accounted for) is the digression on the origin of language in the second Discourse. See Rousseau, 1997b, 145–9. For a notable exception, see Senellart, 2002. See Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 7: ‘It is therefore contrary to the nature of the body politic for the Sovereign to impose on itself a law which it cannot break [ . . . ]. [T]here is not, nor can there be, any kind of fundamental law that is obligatory for the body of the people, not even the social contract.’ See the complete text of the Geneva Manuscript in Rousseau, 1994b, 104. These paragraphs follow on the sentence, ‘One should not from all this conclude with Warburton that among us politics and religion have a common object, but rather that at the origin of nations one serves as the instrument of the other,’ which will remain the conclusion of the definitive version of the Social Contract, Rousseau, 1997e, Book II, chapter 7. On founders of states generally, see Machiavelli, 1989, Book 1, chapter 9. ‘Through this saintly, sublime, genuine Religion, men, as children of the same God, all recognize one another as brothers, and the society that unites them does not dissolve even at death.’

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Index

Age of Revolution (1789–1848) 10, 114, 116, 125 Arendt, H. 51, 59, 112 Aristotle 35 Ashcraft, R. 21 Bachofen, B. 5–6, 9–10, 25, 95 Baczko, B. 104, 176 Badiou, A. 106–10 Baggesen, A. 120 Baggesen, J. 119 Baker, K. M. 52 Balibar, E. 98–9 Balzac, H. de 83–4 La Comédie humaine 83 Le Père Goriot 83 Bang, G. 126 Barbeyrac, J. 178 Barère, B. 56 Barthes, R. 158 Batista, F. 98 Beck, F. 125 Benthamist radicalism 116 Bergson, H. 156 Berlin, I. 12, 28, 51 Bernardi, B. 95, 178 Bernstorff, A. P. 120 Bildung 79 Biou, J. 155 Birckner, M. G. 119 Blanc, L. 124–5, 128 Blum, C. 52 body politic 24–5, 59, 74, 101, 136, 141, 181, 189 Boissel, F. 56 Bonald, L. de 126, 180

Borgbjerg, F. 126 Bourdieu, P. 186 Bourg, J. 4, 9 Brandes, G. 125–6 Brassart, P. 161 Brown, H. G. 176 Bruun, M. K. 120 Burke, E. 5, 9, 65, 116, 120 Burlamaqui, J.-J. 178 Calvin, J. 23 Canovan, M. 37 Carlsen, O. 117, 119 Cassirer, E. 9 Castro, F. 47, 98 Chalier, J. 88 Chateaubriand, F-R. de 83 Génie du christianisme 83 Chaumette, P-G. 56 Chénier, M-J. 56 ‘Hymn to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ 56 Church, C. 116 civic virtue 141–3 of Émile 143–5 from society’s perspective 145–8 civil religion 22, 146, 190, 193–4 cold war, the 9, 52–3, 62 Collot d’Herbois, J-M. 56 communism 51, 116 Condillac, E. B. de 162 Condorcet, N. de 171–2 conservatism 6, 116, 122, 189 Constant, B. 11–12, 28, 116, 124, 175–6 The Copenhagen Post 124 Corinthians 2.3:3 92 Corsican revolution, the 158–9

212

Index

Couthon, G. A. 58, 62 Craiutu, A. 124 creation, the dilemma of 135–6 Crocker, L. G. 154 Cromwell, O. 22, 152, 156 D’Alembert, J. 156, 170, 173 Dallmayr, F. 34 Darnton, R. 168 David, C. N. 122 Davies, P. 51 Deleuze, G. 1, 152–3, 159 Delon, M. 163 democracy 23–7 modern people and 27–30 democratic revolution 1 democratization 115–16 Demosthenes 164–6, 171 Denmark, Rousseau reception in 114–28 Modern Political Culture, development of 115–17 beyond 1850 125–7 first phase (1750s-1780s) 117–18 second phase- The French Revolution (1789–1815 ) 119–22 third phase- repoliticization 122–5 d’Épinay, Mme L. 171 Derathé, R. 9, 178 Jean-Jacques Rousseau 178 Derrida, J. 191 Descartes, R. 32, 87 Diderot , D. 6, 83, 156, 161–2, 173 Dirckinck-Holmfeld, C. 125 Douglass, F. 35 Engels, F. 99–100 English Revolution 23, 152, 156 Euripides 119 Falaky, F. 7 Fanon, F. 4, 31, 38, 41, 49, 50 Black Skin,White Masks 40 on Manicheanism and liberation 41–9 on method 40–1

Farr, J. 11 fascism 51 Fichte, J. G. 72, 119 Flynn, B. 53 fortuna 11 Fourier, C. 125 Franklin, B. 56 freedom, legislation of 136–7 traits of apt subject for 137–41 French Revolution 2–3, 7–9, 18–19, 47, 52, 98, 106, 110, 115, 117 Friisberg, C. 122 Furet, F. 52, 54, 175–6 ‘The French Revolution Is Over’ 175 Furetière, A. 163 Gagnebin, B. 98 Gauchet, M. 179 Ginzburg, C. 83 Girardin, L.-R. 89 Glorious Revolution, the 23 Gordon, J. A. 4 Gordon, L. 44 Gough, H. 51 gradualism 189 Gregoire, H. 56–7 Grotius, H. 142, 178 Grundtvig, N. F. S. 123, 127 Guattari, F. 159 Gueniffey, P. 52 Guérin, D. 176 Guingéné, P.-L. 88 Lettres sur les Confessions 88 Guizot, F. 116, 124 Habermas, J. 161 Hampson, N. 52 Hatzenberger, A. 1, 11, 159–60 Hegel, G. W. F. 4, 49, 64, 78, 117, 124 civil society and the problem of general will 76–9 Jenaer Realphilosophie 68 Lectures on the Philosophy of History 64 Phenomenology of Spirit 64–5, 69, 72 Philosophy of Right 4, 64–5, 69 Hennings, A. V. 119, 121 Hérault de Séchelle, M.-J. 110–1

Index Hesse, C. 52–3, 55 Hobbes, T. 24, 33, 39, 142, 145, 178 Hobsbawm, E. J. 116 Høffding, H. 125 Holm, E. 117, 119 Homer 119 Horstbøll, H. 116–17 Hugo, V. 98 Iran 1, 3 green movement in 3 presidential elections (2009) 1 Israel, J. 6 Israel-Lebanon war (2006) 3 Jacobin movement 51–2, 54–8, 64–5, 67, 86, 88, 93, 115–16, 121, 123, 125 Jean-Jacques Rousseau à ses derniers moments 56 Jensen, C. E. 126 Johnson, D. 124 Jørgensen, H. 117, 119 Kant, I. 49, 72, 78, 117, 119 Kelly, C. 37 Koch, C. H. 117 Kolderup-Rosenvinge, J. L. A. 125 The Koran 93 Koselleck, R. 10 Kraft, J. 117–18 Krarup, S. 127 Kruse, L. 119–20 Labrosse, C. 168 Laconism 172–3 La Feuille villageoise 88 Lamy, B. 170 Landauer, G. 160 Die Revolution 160 Langballe, J. 127 Lauritsen, H. R. 8 Lefort, C. 53 Leibnitz, G. W. 87 Le Moniteur universel 55 L’Enfance de Jean-Jacques Rousseau 56 Lenin, V. 4

213

Le Peletier, L.-M. 88 Les Révolutions de Paris 94 Lévi-Strauss, C. 34 liberalism 51, 116, 122, 126, 175 Locke, J. 5, 6, 19–22, 24–8, 118, 142, 178 Longinus 168 Louis XV 161 Lycurgus 166–7, 172, 184, 193 McDonald, J. 52 Machiavelli, N. 11, 145, 179, 193 Maistre, J. de 51, 59, 116, 126 Malesherbes 170 Mallet du Pan, J. 93 Le Mercure britannique 93 Malon, B. 126 Manin, B. 2 Mao Zedong 109–10 Marat, J.-P. 89–90, 93 Martin, J.-C. 54 Marx, K. 3, 42, 51, 59, 79, 99, 100, 105 Meaume, E. 90 Mellon, S. 123 Mercier, L-S. 7, 85, 154, 172 Le Tableau de Paris 172 Mettrie, J. O. de La 85–6 L’Homme-machine 85 Mirabeau, H. 90, 176 Moliere 84, 94 Møller, P. S. 126–7 Montesquieu, C. 2, 20, 124, 182, 187–8 Mornet, D. 93 Mossin, C. 10 Mounier, J.-J. 95 Moyn, S. 52–3 Nancy, J.-L. 163 Nannestad, N. 118 Napoleon 54, 153 Neuhouser, F. 69 Newton, I. 32 Niedleman, J. 36 Nietzsche, F. 160 Untimely Meditations 160 Numa Pompilius 166–7, 184, 193 Nuzzo, A. 4, 77

214

Index

Nygaard, B. 8–9, 117, 122, 124–5 Paine, T. 119 Palissot de Montenoy, C. 56, 89–90 Mémoire sur la Littérature 90 The Philosophes 56, 89 Palmer, R. R. 51 Pascal, B. 19 Paulhan, J. 163 Les Fleurs de Tarbes 163 Pettit, P. 5 Plato 19, 168–9, 171, 180 Crito 19 Phaedrus 168–9 Plutarch 165–8, 170, 172–3 ‘Life of Demosthenes’ 165–6 ‘The Life of Lycurgus’ 172–3 Parallel Lives 170, 172 Pocock, J. G. A. 5–6, 179 Popper, K. 154 possessive individualism 116, 118 Prudhomme, L.-M. 94 Pufendorf, S. von 178 Pythagoras 169 Quinet, E. 87–8 La Révolution 87 radicalism 3, 115–16, 122, 124–5, 128, 154 Rancière, J. 100–1, 104 reading, theory of 167–9 Reagan, R. 152–3 Restoration 20, 43, 115, 127 revolutionary government 109–11 Rice, C. 3 right 72 as the Dasein of the free will 72 Ripstein, A. 73, 75 Robespierre, M. 4, 10, 30, 51, 53–5, 57–8, 60, 62, 87, 106, 165–6, 168 Romulus Augustus 193 Rothe, T. 117–18 Rotteck, K. V. 116 Rousseau, J-J. 2, 4, 17–22, 24–8, 32, 34–8, 59, 66–7, 70, 73–4, 76, 91–2, 94–5, 99–100, 102–4, 107,

109, 111–12, 118, 135–7, 139–43, 153, 156–60, 162–5, 167–73, 178, 180, 181, 183–4, 187, 189–90, 192–3 and Corsica 37–40, 45 the French Revolution 51–62 Rousseau in the terror of 54–8 Rousseau’s influence on 61–2 terror as the vacuum of 52–4 on illegitimacy 34–7 on method 31–4 paradoxical conservatism of 17–30 on violence 58–61 Rousseau’s works The Confessions 17, 27, 119 Considerations 183–5, 187, 189, 191–3 Dialogues 18, 182 Discourse on Inequality 19–20, 92, 95, 117, 171, 189, 193 Discourse on Political Economy 25 Discourse on the Art and Sciences 159–60 Discourse on the Virtue 158 Émile 18–19, 28, 56, 89–90, 114, 119, 149, 164, 172 Essay on the Origin of Languages 161, 189 First Discourse 33 Fragments politiques 167 Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse 167, 192 The Letters Written from the Mountain 22 Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater 170, 180, 182–3, 190, 192 On the Origins of Inequality 119 Pygmalion 56 Second Discourse 31–2, 35, 41, 156, 159 The Social Contract 18, 21–2, 26, 28, 31, 34, 51–2, 55–6, 58–60, 62, 64, 66, 74, 84, 88, 91–6, 98–9, 101, 107, 119–21, 124–5, 146, 156–8, 164, 176–80, 190–1, 193 Roussel, J. 17, 88, 93, 123–4 Russian Revolution 51 Saint-Just, L.-A. de 58, 62, 172, 176 Saint Paul 92 Schama, S. 52

Index Schiern, F. 124 Schlegel, J. F. W. 119 Schmidt, J. 68, 77 Schmitt, C. 54 Schoenhals, M. 110 Seip, J. A. 116–17 Sénac de Meilhan, G. 93 Servius Tullius 193 Skinner, Q. 5 Soboul, A. 2, 176 Socrates 168–9 Solon 167 Sørensen, Ø. 116–17, 119, 126 Spinoza, B. 6, 87 Spitz, J-F. 5–6 spoken word 161–7 community and the speaking subject 166–7 malady of, the 162–4 pedagogy of voice 164–6 Staël, M. de 126, 166, 175–6 Stalin, J. 152 Starobinski, J. 107–8 Steffens, H. 122–3 Stelling-Michaud, S. 103 Stender-Petersen, O. 124 Stewart, J. 117, 122 Stilling, P. M. 125 Stybe, S. E. 117 Süßenberger, C. 120 Swenson, J. 7, 9, 11, 12, 52, 54, 93, 95, 102, 104, 110, 177 On Jean-Jacques Rousseau 95 Sydney, A. 19

The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy 5 Talmon, J. L. 110, 154 Tetens, J.-N. 121–3 Thérèse Levasseur 57 Thuriot, J-A. 57 Tocqueville, A. de 170 L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution 170 Vaughan, C. E. 155, 159 Verulam 32 Viroli, M. 5 virtú 11 Volney, C.-F. de 89 Voltaire 2, 17, 56, 84, 90, 94, 124, 126, 157 Candide 85 Wåhlin, V. 116 Weber, M. 36 will arbitrary will (Willkür) 72–3, 75–6 general will (volonté générale) 64, 71, 78, 112 indivisibility of 99–101 private will vs. 73–6 universal and individual will 68–72 will of all (volonté de tous) 64, 78 writing 169–72 as a form of mourning 169 as mute language 169–72 and painting 169 Xenocrates 171 Yamashita, M. 11

Taine, H. 51 Talmon, J. 5, 51

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Žižek, S. 4

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