Rousseau and Revolution

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.