Rousseau and Revolution

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