Rousseau and Revolution

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.