Rousseau and Revolution

60 Rousseau and Revolution
of the past takes the place of memory, and when the state, set ablaze by
civil wars, is reborn, so to speak, from its ashes and, issuing from the arms
of death, regains the vigor of its youth. (Ibid., Book II, chapter 8)
And yet this revolutionary rebirth runs the risk of chaos, for a newly formed
social being is vulnerable to ‘disturbances’ that may ‘destroy it’ and whose
chaos leads the people, not toward lawgivers and liberators, but toward dictators
and masters who ride a wave of ‘public panic’ and pass ‘destructive
laws’ (ibid., Book II, chapter 8).
So what are we to make of these treatments of violence in Books I and II
of the Social Contract? There seem number of points the protagonists of the
Terror might endorse: ‘anyone who refuses to obey the general will shall be
compelled to do so by the entire body’; citizens must fi ght and risk their lives
for the state; wrongdoers are rebels and traitors subject to the laws of war;
the fi res of revolution can enable a nation to be reborn. And Robespierre
might have seen himself in Rousseau’s assertion that although a lawgiver
must ‘destroy’ that which interferes with establishing the law, his superior
character traits prevent him from becoming a tyrant. Yet as Rousseau notes,
such traits are rare. Might he not have observed in 1793 and 1794 the loss of
liberty, the hunger for a master and not a liberator, usurpers and tyrants riding
a wave of ‘public panic’ and passing ‘destructive laws’? As he writes in
Book II, chapter 5, too many executions – and the Terror was nothing if not
too many executions – actually show ‘weakness or laxity in the government’
(ibid., Book I, chapter 7 and Book II, chapter 5).
It is in Book III of the Social Contract, however, that Rousseau makes his
strongest criticisms of how violence undermines a republic as a matter of
governance. Violence is the result of a confusion of roles: for example, ‘if
the magistrate [instead of the legislature] wishes to make laws [ . . . ] disorder
follows upon order [ . . . ] and the state thus dissolves into despotism
or anarchy.’ Furthermore, there is the problem of scale. Large populations
need ‘more repressive force’ and thus a larger state. But the bigger the
state, the greater the risk of an abuse of power. If ‘the prince’ makes ‘public
force’ too much his own, ‘two sovereigns’ are created: the government and
the people. Again on the issue of scale, this time of territory and not population,
Rousseau observes that the ‘force’ of tyrannical governments is more
effective ‘over great distances’. France, of course, had both a large territory
and a sizeable population. The dilemma for democracy is even more complicated,
given its relation to contingency and chance: no other government
is more ‘subject to civil wars and domestic unrest as a democratic or
popular government’. Was the Terror then the result of a confusion of