Rousseau and Revolution

Rousseau and Revolution

Continuum Studies in Political Philosophy
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Rousseau and Revolution
Edited by
Holger Ross Lauritsen
and
Mikkel Thorup

Continuum International Publishing Group
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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
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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 2010051887
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mikkel Thorup
Part 1: Democracy and Violence
Chapter 1: Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions:
Rousseau’s Paradoxical Conservatism 17
Blaise Bachofen
Chapter 2: The General Will and National Consciousness:
Radical Requirements of Democratic Legitimacy
in the Writing of Rousseau and Fanon 31
Jane Anna Gordon
Chapter 3: Rousseau and the Terror: A Reassessment 51
Julian Bourg
Chapter 4: Arbitrariness and Freedom: Hegel on Rousseau
and Revolution 64
Angelica Nuzzo
Part 2: Philosophy and Political Change
Chapter 5: Reverse Revolution: The Paradox of
Rousseau’s Authorship 83
Fayçal Falaky
Chapter 6: The General Will between Conservation and Revolution 98
Holger Ross Lauritsen
Chapter 7: Rousseau and Revolution in the Making of a Modern
Political Culture: Denmark 1750–1850 114
Bertel Nygaard

vi Contents
Part 3: Revolution and History
Chapter 8: Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order 133
Christiane Mossin
Chapter 9: Rousseau and the Revolutions of the Earth: Remarks
on a Natural Metaphor 152
Antoine Hatzenberger
Chapter 10: The Revolutionary Return of the Orator:
Public Space and the Spoken Word in the Work of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 161
Masano Yamashita
Chapter 11: Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic 175
James Swenson
Bibliography 197
Index 211

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 refl ected 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 fl ow 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 fi nal
materialization as a book.
Aarhus, September 2010
Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mikkel Thorup

This page intentionally left blank

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 specifi c 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 fi nd out what
Rousseau actually meant about revolution. Or rather, the purpose is not
merely to fi nd 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 refl ections on revolution may offer us in
our present political and social condition.
Why, then, is Rousseau relevant today, and why is the concept of (polit ical)
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

2 Rousseau and Revolution
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 infl uence 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 infl uential 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 3
attempt to fulfi l 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 specifi c 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, simplifi ed 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 fi ll 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 specifi c
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

4 Rousseau and Revolution
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
popu lar 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
benefi cent 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 5
we fi nd two versions of this applied to Rousseau. The fi rst 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 specifi cally, Bachofen claims that Rousseau’s
republican conception of democracy is more concerned about ‘the moral
precondition for freedom’, that is, a long and diffi cult 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, Jean-
Fabien 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.

6 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi nd 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 briefl y sketched out by Jonathan Israel in
his Radical Enlightenment. Similarly to Bachofen and Spitz, Israel claims that
Rousseau’s place in a specifi c 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 fi ltered 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 7
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 infl uence, 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 fi t for different and

8 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi t 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
t inent 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 9
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
affi rmed 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 fi nally 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 infl uence 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 (Jean-
Jacques 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 infl uence,
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

10 Rousseau and Revolution
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 infl uential
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 fi rst 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 confl icting 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 fl ood to the participants and
spectators: An unleashing of uncontrollable forces diffi cult, if not impossible

Introduction 11
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 fi gure 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 refi ned 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 fi nal 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 camoufl aged 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

12 Rousseau and Revolution
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 refl ections 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 defi ned 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 fi nal 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 fi t 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-refl ection 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 13
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.

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Part One
Democracy and Violence

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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 infl uence. (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

18 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi gure,
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 fi nd a justifi cation for the events which were to
unfold a little more than a decade after his death. But are such prophecies
justifi cations? Would Rousseau, if he had lived longer, have participated
enthusiastically in the revolutionary event? In order to attempt to resolve
these diffi cult 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 justifi able 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

20 Rousseau and Revolution
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 infl uence: that of Montesquieu.
The very vocabulary used by Rousseau testifi es 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

Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions 21
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
specifi ed 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 justifi cation 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

22 Rousseau and Revolution
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
anthropo logical 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

Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions 23
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 fi rst 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

24 Rousseau and Revolution
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
poli tic can in no way be the result of a spontaneous and informal process.
This fi rst sense of the word institution is strongly connected with the
institution in the second sense, that is to say, education. In both cases, the
diffi culty 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 diffi cult. 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 diffi cult and most rare.
Rousseau opposes Locke on this point not only in his political writings, but
also in his pedagogical ones and in his refl ection on the theologico-political

Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions 25
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 infl uenced
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 diffi culties of this
enterprise:
I am sensible to the diffi culty 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 stifl ed, would fear you a hundred times more than
servitude. [ . . . ] To emancipate the peoples of Poland is a grand and fi ne
undertaking, but bold, dangerous, and not to be attempted thoughtlessly.
Among the precautions to be taken, there is one that is indispensable

26 Rousseau and Revolution
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 specifi cally 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: ‘Selfi shness 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 superfi cial 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 justifi es 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
fl eetingly 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 suffi
cient. 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

Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions 27
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
fi xed 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 diffi cult and much more unusual than we might think,
especially if we have not suffi ciently refl ected 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 defi nitely 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, confi dence 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

28 Rousseau and Revolution
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

Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions 29
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 specifi c 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 fi rst 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

30 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi gures 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
refl ections on the possibility of work in the arts and sciences contributing to

32 Rousseau and Revolution
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 satisfi ed 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, product ive
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 fl awed. To get to the root of what

General Will and National Consciousness 33
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 refl ection, 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

34 Rousseau and Revolution
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
superfi cial 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; fi rst 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 fi ll 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

General Will and National Consciousness 35
necessity and prudence. Without independent acts of consent, these simply
set one person’s private interest up against those of others, refl ecting 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 refl ection 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 refl ection 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

36 Rousseau and Revolution
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 defi ned 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 signifi cance of his or her disinvestment from
political life and to see idiosyncratic individual preferences as a more meaningful
and signifi cant expression of who they were.
Although the general will can at times be reached numerically through
voting, with the signifi cance 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

General Will and National Consciousness 37
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 fi rst 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 fi guring out
how to transform its primarily agricultural economy into an asset, most
ambitiously how to translate its produce into international capital. Rousseau

38 Rousseau and Revolution
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 offi -
cials. 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

General Will and National Consciousness 39
best fi t 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 affi rmed as
Corsica’s real source of strength (ibid., 132).
Rousseau sought to fi gure 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.
Effi ciency, 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 refl ections about the qualities of human beings.
Here echoing Hobbes, he wrote that it is fear and hope that govern men.
Parting company there he qualifi ed 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,

40 Rousseau and Revolution
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 offi cials 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 fi ght 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 refl ection 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 infl uences. 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 fi nd their
meaning’ (ibid., 168). In the absence of such meaning, one participates in

General Will and National Consciousness 41
‘[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

42 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi rst 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 disfi gure all that is
beautiful or moral; what it is to be the telos toward which others hope to
move, defi ning 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 diffi cult 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 indefi nitely’ (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,

General Will and National Consciousness 43
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 fi ght the colonized
realize that they fi ght 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 fl oodlights 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 confl ict in which they are engaged. The language of individualism is

44 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi ght 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 fi ghting 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,

General Will and National Consciousness 45
with Rousseau, whether they risked all of what they did for a future that
intensifi es the very relations they aimed to overthrow.
For Fanon, it is not suffi cient 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 fi rst 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 fl ooded 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 fi nally 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 offi -
cially placed in charge of setting the conditions for self-government would
have to remember that it would be worth being less effi cient if the cost of
the smooth and quick exercise of business would be the exclusion of people
from the processes of planning.

46 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi elds 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 fi nal 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
fi ghter 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

General Will and National Consciousness 47
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, fi ll[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 refl ection
of the deliberate shutting down of fl uidity 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 fi nancially to profi t
from them. For Fanon, the national bourgeoisie did precisely this, hijacking
the revolution and reducing national consciousness to narrow nationalism.

48 Rousseau and Revolution
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, satisfi ed to continue as Europe’s farmers, generating
unfi nished 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
offi ces. 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.

General Will and National Consciousness 49
These diffi culties 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] fulfi lled their historical mission of leading the
bourgeoisie to power, they [we]re fi rmly 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 intensifi ed 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 scientifi c 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 psych ologist 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

50 Rousseau and Revolution
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 affi rmed 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
Revolu tion 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 justifi ed 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 popu lar 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 legit imate 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.

52 Rousseau and Revolution
This anti-totalitarian reading of Rousseau’s pernicious infl uence 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, fi rst
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 qualifi -
cations – 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 53
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 unifi ed
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 fl ooded 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 confl uence of
factors and forces that rushed in to fi ll 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 infl uential 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 intensifi cation 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 fi ll 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

54 Rousseau and Revolution
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, fi rst 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 fl ux –
never managed before Napoleon to secure a monopoly on violence. Jean-
Clément 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

Rousseau and the Terror 55
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 qualifi cation 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 fi rst months
of Thermidor demonstrate the limited ways in which Rousseau was evoked.
I have relied on the semi-offi cial 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 confi dant 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 fi nally 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

56 Rousseau and Revolution
name to Émile; and in April 1794, Bertrand Barère denounced counter-
revolutionaries in Marseille who had destroyed busts of Rousseau and
Voltaire. Perhaps signifi cantly, or merely just coincidentally, a fl urry 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 exemplifi ed 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 certifi cat de civisme restored.
Two months later, Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, brought before the Convention
on counter-revolutionary charges, pleaded his bona fi des 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

Rousseau and the Terror 57
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 affi xed 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 suffi ce 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 briefl y 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

58 Rousseau and Revolution
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
Rous seau 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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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

Rousseau and the Terror 59
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-sacrifi cial violence the state can ask its citizens to undertake. One
must ‘fi ght if necessary for the homeland’, which involves ‘certain risks,
even certain losses’. In a sense one is fi ghting for oneself as a member of the
polity, but again, such sacrifi cial 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 sacrifi cial 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

60 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi ght and risk their lives
for the state; wrongdoers are rebels and traitors subject to the laws of war;
the fi res 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

Rousseau and the Terror 61
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 fi ts here (ibid., Book III, chapters 10,
14 and 18).
In the fi nal 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 Infl uence 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
ultim ately 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 confl icting
forces. The Terror was over-determined, and its essence was irreducible to
ideas and books alone.

62 Rousseau and Revolution
Rousseau undoubtedly played a crucial role in the French Revolution.
There were indeed many Rousseaus. By the mid-1790s his infl uence 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 fl ourished 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 horrifi ed 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 confl icts 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 suffi cient 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.

Rousseau and the Terror 63
Notes
1 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 confi
dence 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’.
2 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.
3 The issue points back to Max Weber’s defi nition (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’.
4 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).
5 Le Moniteur 44 (4 November 1793); 234 (13 May 1794); 338 (25 August 1794); 24
(15 October 1794).
6 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).
7 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).
8 Le Moniteur 33 (24 October 1793); 48 (8 November 1793); 112 (11 January
1794).
9 Le Moniteur 8 (29 September 1794); 8 bis. (29 September 1794); 12 (3 October
1794); 19 (10 October 1794); 20 (11 October 1794).
10 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 fl aw 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
identifi cation 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 fi nally 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

Arbitrariness and Freedom 65
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 fi rst 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 refl ection.
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

66 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi nd themselves at odds with one another’
(Rousseau, 1997e, Book 1, opening). The problem of the general will has
its root in the diffi culty 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

Arbitrariness and Freedom 67
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, infl exible, 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,

68 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi gure back to which Hegel traces the origin of the state in a sort of
mythical genealogy. His interest, however, is chiefl y 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

Arbitrariness and Freedom 69
amorphous feudal aggregate of the ancien régime into the fi rst democratic
republic of modernity – into the fi rst 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 fi rst democratic republic of modernity and the
fi rst 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
fi nding 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 fulfi lling 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

70 Rousseau and Revolution
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 justifi ed, 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 fi rst 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

Arbitrariness and Freedom 71
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 identifi cation 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 fi nd 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

72 Rousseau and Revolution
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 defi nes 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 fi rst, abstract manifestation of subjective freedom. In its selfrefl
ection, 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 satisfi ed. 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 specifi city 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 defi nes
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:
fi rst, ‘free refl ection, 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

Arbitrariness and Freedom 73
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 fi t 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 justifi cation 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 fi delity’ 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

74 Rousseau and Revolution
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
neces sary 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

Arbitrariness and Freedom 75
will. 8 Although Rousseau seems to sidestep the problem and concentrate on
the necessity and suffi ciency 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 fi rst 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

76 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi nd 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
eth ical 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 fulfi lling 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

Arbitrariness and Freedom 77
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 fi rst 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 justifi cation 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 fi nd 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

78 Rousseau and Revolution
others that she is able to fulfi ll 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 ‘selfi sh’, 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-fl edged universality of the state in which individuality is fi nally 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 signifi cantly close
to Smith’s peculiar ‘impartial spectator’ 10 position. His point is that within
the sphere of civil society individual selfi sh motivations are acted upon
because they display a refl ective 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 selfi sh 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 selfi sh motivation must be recognized as a shared selfi sh 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 selfi sh 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 fi t the requirements of Rousseau’s ‘general
will’ or to pass the universalizability test of Kant’s categorical imperative.

Arbitrariness and Freedom 79
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 refl exivity 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 fi nal 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 fi nds its
justifi cation 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 insignifi cant that Marx’s later refl ections 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.

80 Rousseau and Revolution
6 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.
7 For a persuasive reading of this passage see Neuhouser, 1993, 380 ff. (388–9 for
the ‘capriciousness’ of the will in the political institution).
8 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.
9 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.
10 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

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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 confi des 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

84 Rousseau and Revolution
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’
superfi cial culture:
When he fi rst 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 fi gure 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

Reverse Revolution 85
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 fi lling the spiritual vacuum left by the dethroned God
of the Catholic edifi ce. 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 fi gure 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 fi rst to form a
clear idea of it, and, consequently, to describe it. This is why all the

86 Rousseau and Revolution
investigations the greatest philosophers have made a priori, that is, by
wanting to take fl ight 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 phil osophy 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 refi nement 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 edifi ce, 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.

Reverse Revolution 87
The new spiritual context required a prophetic fi gure 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 fi ght 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 fi lling 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
sacrifi ced.
After Robespierre had thus struck at what he called philosophisme, he
took away his own justifi cation for existing. At the end, he came upon
Catholicism, as if nothing had changed (ibid., 171–2). 4

88 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi gure 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 glorifi ed in a covenant of persecution and suffering.
By placing him on the altar, people were reminded of their own affl ictions
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 sacrifi cial consecration which until then was
limited to the “trinity” of Le Peletier, Marat and Chalier. (Ibid.)

Reverse Revolution 89
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

90 Rousseau and Revolution
philosopher. When Palissot asked for a certifi cat de civisme [civic certifi cate], 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 defi le 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
certifi cate of civism to Palissot; may this act of justice be an expiatory
sacrifi ce 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 sacrifi ce
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)

Reverse Revolution 91
In a footnote however, after insisting on the non-religious character of the
worship, the author adds, ‘Jean-Jacques will indisputably be the fi rst 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 fi liation
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 signifi cant.
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 fi nd
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

92 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi rst discourse, he encourages the readers
of the second discourse, of the Discourse on Inequality to close the scientifi
c 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 fi re.
Having appeared in thirty-two editions between 1789 and 1799, 8 it was

Reverse Revolution 93
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 refl ected 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 signifi cance 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 refl ects 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).

94 Rousseau and Revolution
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
refl ecting 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 signifi cance 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 affi rmation. To say that Rousseau wrote something which

Reverse Revolution 95
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 redefi ne 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 refl ects 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 infl uence of these principles that produced the
Revolution. On the Contrary, it was the Revolution that produced their
infl uence’ (Swenson, 2000, 15). This reverse infl uence 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 refl ect his infl uence on them. The
social spirit which would safeguard the foundations of the republic and

96 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fl uid, 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 refl ect 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 fi gure 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 scientifi
c and refl ects 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

Reverse Revolution 97
teach man the fi rst words of the fi rst 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 edifi ed Catholic France, unprepared for liberty, we see the Revolution partially
keep, at fi rst, 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 Certifi cates were mainly delivered to public
offi cials 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 confi
rm 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 diffi culties 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 fi rst 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

General Will between Conservation and Revolution 99
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 fi rst 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

100 Rousseau and Revolution
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 infi delity 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 defi nition 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 fi nd 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).

General Will between Conservation and Revolution 101
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,

102 Rousseau and Revolution
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.

General Will between Conservation and Revolution 103
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 defi nition illegal. Nevertheless,
Rousseau might have thought of such a solution. As a matter of fact,
when discussing the Constitution of Poland, he praises a specifi c 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 Stelling-
Michaud, 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

104 Rousseau and Revolution
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 defi nition 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
anarch ist 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

General Will between Conservation and Revolution 105
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 specifi c 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), sacrifi ces 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

106 Rousseau and Revolution
exclusively to a confl ict between indivisibility and inalienability. This ambiguity
is also due to a contradiction inside the concept of indivisibility, that is,
a confl ict 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 benefi cial 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 fi nd 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 confl ict

General Will between Conservation and Revolution 107
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 fi rst kind of indivisibility and he thus
avoids the confl ict.
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 fi nd 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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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.

108 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fulfi lment
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 diffi cult 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 confl ict 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

General Will between Conservation and Revolution 109
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 fi nds 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

110 Rousseau and Revolution
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 defi nes 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 fi gures 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 confi dence that the
people will rise if necessary.
Revolutionary government is another answer to this question, as exemplifi
ed 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

General Will between Conservation and Revolution 111
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 confi dence 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 effi cient 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

112 Rousseau and Revolution
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 confl ict 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 fi nd 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 113
2 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 specifi c 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 specifi c 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 defi ned 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 115
Choosing Danish history as the fi eld of study may provide more than just
an element of exoticism or just another empirical fi eld 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 specifi c formations of political discourse. On the one
hand, these formations refl ected 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 clarifi cations and a brief introduction to signifi -
cant 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 confi
rmed 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

116 Rousseau and Revolution
of the three interrelated positions may be initially defi ned by a peculiar
relation to the new discourse of change and democratization just mentioned:
(1) conservatism, defi ned 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, defi ned
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
infl uence 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 infl uences 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
offi cially acknowledged at the institutional level with the formation of provincial
assemblies of estates with advisory functions in 1831–4. Its defi nitive
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 post-
1848 European regimes.

Making of a Modern Political Culture 117
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 fi rst 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

118 Rousseau and Revolution
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 specifi cally 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
refl ected 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
specifi cally 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
‘fi t’ 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 infl uential, yet their very triviality may refl ect a widely
shared reservation towards Rousseau in the educated public at the time.

Making of a Modern Political Culture 119
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 fi xated
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 fi gure 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 refl ections 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

120 Rousseau and Revolution
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 ‘terrifi ed 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 signifi cantly, such blank condemnations of Rousseau were not stated
publicly, let alone elaborated in writings of political theory. And while the

Making of a Modern Political Culture 121
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 affi nity 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 Johan-
Nikolaus 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

122 Rousseau and Revolution
course, fi nd 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
confl icts, 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
revo lutionary spirit of the fi rst 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 intensifi ed 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 fi nally 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).

Making of a Modern Political Culture 123
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’ infi nity to a ‘prosaic’ worship of the fi nite 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 ‘magnifi cence 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 superfi cial 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 qualifi cations 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

124 Rousseau and Revolution
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
signifi cant 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,

Making of a Modern Political Culture 125
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 fi gure 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

126 Rousseau and Revolution
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 ‘fi rst 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 infl uential 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

Making of a Modern Political Culture 127
‘invented’ [fundet på] the social orders of ‘Hitler and Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot
and Kim Il Sung’ (Møller, 1996, 151). With signifi cantly 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 solidifi cation 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
refl ections 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

128 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi rst 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.

Making of a Modern Political Culture 129
10 Cf. also his remarks on Marat as an eager, but superfi cially 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.
11 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.
12 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.
13 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.
14 A brief, less specifi c 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.
15 Minutes of Folketinget, 23 January 2009, 24 April 2008 and 12 March 2002, accessed
via www.folketinget.dk.

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Part Three
Revolution and History

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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

134 Rousseau and Revolution
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 signifi cant 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 diffi culties 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 signifi cant – 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 refl ections 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 refl ections 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
fi nally, 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.

Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order 135
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
modifi es 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

136 Rousseau and Revolution
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 diffi culties of change. Now, what
are the characteristics of these diffi culties, 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

Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order 137
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 diffi cult 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 fi t for legislation? One which, while fi nding itself
already bound together by some union or origin, interest, or convention,

138 Rousseau and Revolution
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 selfsuffi
cient, fi nally, one which combines the stability of an ancient people
with the docility of a new people (ibid., 77–8).
One does not need to refl ect 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, selfsuffi
cient 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 fi nal 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 fi t 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 diffi culty
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 fl aws of the
nascent governments, for instance:
[ . . . ] having begun badly, time revealed its fl aws and suggested remedies
but could never repair the vices of the Constitution; it was constantly

Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order 139
being patched; whereas the thing to do would have been to begin by
purging the threshing fl oor 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 specifi c forms of government
should be chosen on the basis of specifi c 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 diffi culties 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 fi nd 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
refi ned 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).

140 Rousseau and Revolution
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 defi nitions 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 fi nd 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 qualifi cations 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

Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order 141
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

142 Rousseau and Revolution
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 defi ned 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 specifi c characteristics of the two kinds of virtue a
clarifi cation of Rousseau’s concept of ‘human nature’ is necessary.
When defi ning 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 fi ctional 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 defi ne 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 defi ned 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.

Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order 143
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 modifi cations 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 defi ning 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 scientifi c, 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 fl owering 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 fi t
in everywhere and nowhere in particular. When fully formed, he will be able

144 Rousseau and Revolution
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 infl uenced 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 infl exibility that no man

Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order 145
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 defi ned 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 justifi ed. (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

146 Rousseau and Revolution
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 benefi cent
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 effi cient, 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 fi rst 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 defi ning 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 defi nition 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

Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order 147
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 fi rst 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
specifi c direction and content. The fi rst 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 fl ow 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

148 Rousseau and Revolution
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 infl icted 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 refl ections on change rather than on his defi nitions
of a just political order. But as has become clear, what drives the
refl ections 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 refl ections 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
power ful 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 confl icting customs or in a cultural
order where laws have crumbled. He introduces the perspective of old

Creation, Destruction and Continuity of Order 149
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 specifi c 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 defi ned 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 fi nd 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

150 Rousseau and Revolution
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
refi nements 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 specifi c 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 polit ical
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 151
4 For a comprehensive, refl ective reading of Rousseau’s understanding of nature as
dialectical and historical anthropology (against the conventional standard opposition
of nature and artifi ce), 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 fi re, air & water. See TERRE, FOSSILES, DEL-
UGES, 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.

Rousseau and the Revolutions of the Earth 153
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 [unfi t 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, fi nally, with the last words of his comments

154 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi rst 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

Rousseau and the Revolutions of the Earth 155
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 fi re
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’: Defi nitions
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.

156 Rousseau and Revolution
On a fi rst 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 fi rst 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 defi nitions 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 defi nition, 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 fi re, air and water
(the article cross-refers to fl oods 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.

Rousseau and the Revolutions of the Earth 157
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 fi rst 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
defi nition 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 afl ame 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

158 Rousseau and Revolution
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 specifi -
city 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 ‘fi rst 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

Rousseau and the Revolutions of the Earth 159
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
artifi cially 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
diffi cult 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 ‘infi nite movement’ (ibid., 96), revolutions are events by
which the face of human societies was – and still can be – continually modifi
ed 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
defi ned in the Encyclopédie as a ‘continued metaphor’. Although sometimes
diffi cult to decipher, as the allegory of Prometheus that opens the Discourse

160 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi re 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
defi ned 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. Suffi ce 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 See also Crocker, 1994.
2 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

162 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi ctional 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 fi rst maxim of modern politics’ (Rousseau, 1998, 332). This historical
refl ection 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 fi nd 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 diffi culty, 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)

Revolutionary Return of the Orator 163
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 refl ection 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 signifi es ‘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

164 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi elds 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 fi elds 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
fi elds, 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 fi gured 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 benefi ts 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

Revolutionary Return of the Orator 165
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 fi nd them in case of need, and we do not fi nd 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 diffi culty 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 fi gure 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 battlefi elds 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 fi nd at
their common charge, was fi fteen thousand footmen, all strangers, and two

166 Rousseau and Revolution
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
infl ame 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 specifi cally
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 refl ection 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 identifi cation 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

Revolutionary Return of the Orator 167
insert himself into the parallel equation. From the descriptions of doubles
in Plutarch we are led to a triangulation of fi gures 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
confi guration: 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 fi nds Ancient men in modern times’
(Rousseau, 1961a, 60). In his theoretical discourses it is indeed the classical,
Plutarchan fi gure 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
refl ect 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 fi gure 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 fi gure, 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 fi nd my pleasure. (Rousseau, 1964b, 500)
A Theory of Reading: Identifi cation 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,

168 Rousseau and Revolution
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 refl ections on the perlocutionary highlights the correlated
phenomen of readerly identifi cation 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 fi red 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
fl ashed 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 identifi cation 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

Revolutionary Return of the Orator 169
raised up in its turn and courage is infl amed 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 fi gure 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 fi tting,
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 fi gured 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

170 Rousseau and Revolution
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 Réfl exions 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 refl ect 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
fi gure 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 fi gure. 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)

Revolutionary Return of the Orator 171
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 misfi t baptized l’Ours – the bear –
by Madame d’Épinay and his closest acquaintances and the exemplifi cation
of the orator fi gure, 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 battlefi eld. 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 fi nally
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 fi gurations 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 fi nally
opens up for Rousseau an access into the imaginary, a fantasmatic space in
which the yearning for public speech prefi gures 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 fi gure 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

172 Rousseau and Revolution
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 refl ection 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

Revolutionary Return of the Orator 173
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 fi gure of
the sentence – the maxim form proper to sentientousness – allows Rousseau
to formulate the hypothesis of a language that would circumvent the rhetorical
diffi cultites of argumentation.
In chapter 4 of Essay on the Origin of Languages, which is devoted to
imagining the state of language in its very fi rst 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 defi nitive
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 refl ections 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
fi nally serves to conjure the revolutionary beckoning of the charismatic fi gure
of the orator.

174 Rousseau and Revolution
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 repub l icanism
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 identifi cation in Rousseau and its psychological and ideological
ramifi cations, 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 trifl ing 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, fi rst coming to prominence in
the fi ercely polemical essay, ‘The French Revolution Is Over’ (Furet, 1981,
1–79). Even as Furet rejected the ‘social’ interpretation of the revolution in

176 Rousseau and Revolution
favor of one centered around what we have come to call ‘political culture’, 3
he identifi ed 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,
qualifi ed 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
historiog raphy 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 diversifi cation 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 infl uence of that analysis
during the fi rst 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 177
different discursive traditions and fulfi ll 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 fi rst two
books of the Social Contract represent the properly revolutionary component
in Rousseau’s writing.
This characterization is fi rst 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 ‘infl uence’ 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 fi nd both parties at a given moment claiming Rousseau’s
mantle. 8 The key point that allows for Rousseau’s ‘infl uence’ 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

178 Rousseau and Revolution
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 confl ict between
constitutional and insurrectionary forms of revolutionary legitimacy was
debated. Rousseau’s legacy was most often identifi ed 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 fi rst two books of the Social Contract –
‘taking Rousseau’s fundamental argument to be complete with the defi nition
of the law,’ as Bruno Bernardi has noted – remains quite common and
deeply infl uential (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 defi ne 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 Jean-
Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, remains a defi nitive work
after 50 years because its construction of the corpus upon which Rousseau is
drawing is suffi cient to understand the background to the most infl uential
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 import ant 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
defi ne 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

Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic 179
fundamental object of political analysis. It is Rousseau’s redefi nition of
legitimacy as requiring universal participation in the formulation of the law
in which the ‘revolutionary’ character of his thought, in the somewhat simplifi
ed 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 defi ned as opposition to monarchical rule
(such a defi nition can be taken as the consequence of Montesquieu’s typology
of governments in the spirit of the laws, for example). 13 Rousseau’s
defi nition 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 suffi ciently
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. ‘Suffi cient 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 refl ection 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-suffi ciency, 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 fi rst task of any republican government is to secure the robust

180 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fl atters its audience by confi rming 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 fi nd those which, well
observed, would be the most benefi cial 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

Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic 181
learned, but above all there is the intuition of the modifi cation 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

182 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi rst 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

Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic 183
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 fi rst 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 signifi cant 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

184 Rousseau and Revolution
punishment in favor of law as a system of moral rewards is the key to understanding
Rousseau’s strategy throughout the Considerations. If a fi rst 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 identifi es
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 infi nite
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 fi nal 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

Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic 185
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 fulfi ll this function in that they organize emulation,
that is, the action of ambition or amour propre toward worthy ends.
The principle of particularism further specifi es 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 confl ict 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 confl ict expresses itself as a tension within
as much as between the two principles. In the fi rst 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 diffi cult 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 fi t, 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

186 Rousseau and Revolution
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 effi ciency we must limit our remarks to a brief consideration of
Rousseau’s economics and somewhat longer treatment of his fi nal 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, infl uence 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, Frenchifi ed 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 confi dently
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 prefi gures 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 propre 21 – 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

Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic 187
obligatory’ means precisely that it is not experienced subject ively 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
fi nally, 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 qualifi cation for Poland’s
elective kingship. There are two aspects we should emphasize.
The marche graduelle does not at fi rst 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 offi ce 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

188 Rousseau and Revolution
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
diffi culty 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 confi ned 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

Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic 189
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 diffi culty Rousseau has explaining
transitions between stages. Rather than the interaction of mutually
reinfor cing 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 indefi nitely. 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’: fl oods 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 fi nger 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.

190 Rousseau and Revolution
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 signifi cant 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, honorifi c 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 ‘Classifi cation 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
defi nition of the notions of legitimacy, sovereignty and the general will, and
the pragmatic orientation of Book III, which defi nes 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
import ant 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

Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic 191
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 fi rst place, is defi ned 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 fi rst, 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 defi ned 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

192 Rousseau and Revolution
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 fi rst function of the Spartan ephors upon taking offi ce 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 fl atter 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

Rousseau, the Revolution and the Republic 193
between the two modes. We can illustrate this fi nal point by means of a brief
consideration of the relation between mythical fi gure of the lawgiver and
the ultimate institutionalization of mœurs, the civil religion.
It is well known that the fi rst 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 fi rst 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 fi gure of the mythical lawgiver is a defi ning 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 fi gure and belongs in
the fi rst 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 offi ce, 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.

194 Rousseau and Revolution
The civil religion as described by Rousseau is in fact not a proto-
totalitarian 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 inevit able rise of clerical power in opposition to the
state – but also and more import antly 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 fi gures 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 fi rst 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 195
4 Furet developed this generalized form of the analysis most explicitly in his last
major work on the revolution, Furet, 1992.
5 ‘The people’s liberty is in its private life; do not disturb it’ (Saint-Just, 2004,
1089).
6 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.
7 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.
8 Roger Barny has emphasized the diversity of ‘Rousseauisms’ during the revolution
in a series of publications; for an overview see Barny, 1974.
9 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.
10 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.
11 An important recent contribution to the study of Rousseau’s relation to jusnaturalism
is to be found in the consideration of the incidence of specifi cally Genevan
debates in Rosenblatt, 1997.
12 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 identifi es republicanism
and natural right, underlies the majority of contributions in Belissa, Bosc and
Gauthier, 2009.
13 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.
14 The principle is shared by Romantics of all political stripes; the principle (if not
the precise phrasing) underlies Staël, 1964, 139–256.
15 Rousseau refers this question to the equally straightforward criterion of
population.
16 See the draft of the Social Contract known as the ‘Geneva Manuscript’, Book I,
chapter 2, in Rousseau, 1997e, 154–5.
17 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’.
18 For presentations of the Considerations as utopian by scholars with signifi cant
expertise in Polish history, see Baczko, 1989, 43–70 and Wolff, 1994, 235–83.
19 For a refl ection on the importance of the positive functions of amour propre in
Rousseau, see Cooper, 1999.

196 Rousseau and Revolution
20 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.
21 On the relation between the moralist analysis of amour propre and the economic
concept of interest, see, most recently, Force, 2003.
22 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.
23 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.
24 For a notable exception, see Senellart, 2002.
25 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.’
26 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 defi nitive version of the Social Contract, Rousseau,
1997e, Book II, chapter 7.
27 On founders of states generally, see Machiavelli, 1989, Book 1, chapter 9.
28 ‘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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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
Index
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
fi rst 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

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
Index 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 infl uence 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

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
Taine, H. 51
Talmon, J. 5, 51
Index 215
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
Žižek, S. 4