Rousseau and Revolution

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.