Rousseau and Revolution

2 Rousseau and Revolution
bigger relevance to a discussion of this question than Rousseau. Not just
because of the radically democratic content of his writings but also because
of the immense and complex infl uence these writings have had on the
French Revolution as well as on other revolutions and revolutionary movements
around the world.
‘Whereas Montesquieu reserved power for the aristocracy and Voltaire
for the upper middle class, Rousseau gave the vote to the poor and political
power to all the people’ (Soboul, 1975, 70), the French Marxist historian
Albert Soboul claimed in his infl uential work on the French revolution. In
fact, Rousseau might arguably be seen as the democrat not only in the
Enlightenment, but in the history of Western political thought. No one
before and hardly any one after Rousseau have made institutional propositions
that were as democratic as those of Rousseau or have insisted on the
radical theoretical and practical implications of democracy as intensely as
him. Every contradiction, every implication is taken to its extreme end
point. His criticism of political representation (Rousseau, 1997e, Book III,
chapter 1) and his conception of the relationship between the ‘sovereign’
and the government, that is, between the legislative and the executive
power (Rousseau, 1997e, Book II, chapter 2 and Book III, chapter 1), are
still today central issues in institutional and constitutional debates. As to the
latter idea, modern democracies are still divided between those in which
the executive power and the legislative power, in the words of Montesquieu,
balance each other (for instance the USA and several South-American
countries) and those in which the executive power is subordinated to, that
is, appointed by and responsible before, the legislative power (for instance,
the Scandinavian countries).
As to the critique of representation, no modern democracy has followed
Rousseau’s demand that the entire people be directly involved in the lawmaking
process. Indeed, it could easily be argued that this idea is practically
impossible, and that Rousseau even seems to admit this when, in his proposition
for a reform of the government of Poland, he accepts a kind of political
representation (Rousseau, 1997a, 200–1) or when he in the Social
Contract applies climatology, demography and geography to argue for the
practical irrelevance of democracy for all societies larger than a city state.
Rousseau’s merit, however, is that he has shown, in the most emphatic way,
some of the problems that political representation entails, at a moment in
history where democracy and representative democracy began to become
synonyms (Manin, 1997, 79–93). Ever since, Rousseau has played the role
of reminding the modern world that representative democracy is not the
essence or single truth of democracy, but rather a practical and contingent