Rousseau and Revolution

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