Rousseau and Revolution

Introduction
Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mikkel Thorup
The study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political philosophy is a privileged way
of discussing a large number of topics which are highly relevant today, both
for political scholars and for a larger audience. Posing the specifi c question
of the relationship between Rousseau’s writings and the concept and event
of political revolution has appeared to be a way of uniting a number of very
different explorations and questions under one single heading.
Consequently, we might say that the purpose here is not to fi nd out what
Rousseau actually meant about revolution. Or rather, the purpose is not
merely to fi nd this out. In fact, some of the articles collected in the present
volume contain detailed and convincing attempts to understand Rousseau’s
political philosophy on its own conditions and in its own context, while
others explore what Rousseau’s refl ections on revolution may offer us in
our present political and social condition.
Why, then, is Rousseau relevant today, and why is the concept of (polit ical)
revolution? As to the latter question, an answer is that the phenomenon of
radical political change, including mass movements, is always a burning
political topic, whether one endorses such events or not, just witness the
events in Iran after the 2009 presidential elections. In fact, revolutions simply
seem to happen from time to time. As Gilles Deleuze puts it, according
to Antoine Hatzenberger, ‘people become revolutionary. Fortunately, historians
won’t prevent that’ (Hatzenberger, Chapter 9). Now, while agreeing
with Deleuze and Hatzenberger on the inevitability and recurrent character
of revolutions, one might of course disagree with Deleuze’s use of the word
‘fortunately’. At least, one might claim that revolutions are only ‘fortunate’
in so far as they bring about progress in equality, general prosperity and, not
least, democracy. Still, revolutions, good or bad, seem here to stay.
The important question is thus: What is a good or a democratic revolution?
Or one might even ask: Can revolutions bring about any kind of democracy?
On a more general level, the question which, from the eighteenth
century’s invention of modern mass democracy until today, has been central
to political thinking is: What is the relationship between (mass) democracy
and (political) violence? This book argues that no single theoretician is of