Rousseau and Revolution

Introduction 3
attempt to fulfi l the fundamental democratic demand that the ‘people’
rules while simultaneously making the system workable.
His work serves as a revelatory exercise in the ever imperfect or even
hypocritical manifestations of democracy in the actually existing democracies
and it reminds us that violence is not always the limit or contradiction
of democracy but can, in specifi c historical moments, be its precondition,
ranging from mass democratic movements like the green movement in
Iran to the ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, as then US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice said about the 2006 Israel–Lebanon war (inadvertently
repeating Marx’s famous claim: ‘[T]here is only one way in which the murderous
death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the
new society can be shortened, simplifi ed and concentrated, and that way is
revolutionary terror’ (Marx, 1848)). The radicalism and honesty of Rousseau’s
work forces us to confront tough questions where political preconceptions
fail to fi ll up the crack that a serious engagement with his works
opens.
This book is divided into three thematic sections: (1) Democracy and
Violence, (2) Philosophy and Political Change and (3) Revolution and
History.
Democracy and Violence
Given this central role of Rousseau’s political philosophy in the development
of and the discussion about democracy, inquiries into his conception
of and relation to revolution is also an inquiry into the relationship between
Western democracy and violence. Indeed, in philosophical theories of
democracy, the conception of this relationship is often linked to a specifi c
understanding of Rousseau’s political philosophy. From an overall perspective,
we might group the positions in this debate in three different classes:
First, there is the idea that (too much) democracy entails violence. This violence
is carried out either by the ‘masses’ or the ‘people’ itself in revolutionary
acts or by a sovereign government representing the sovereign
people without being limited in any way. It can be argued that both kinds
of violence were a part of the French Revolution. Now, in such conceptions
of democracy and violence, it seems that Rousseau’s political philosophy
can be conceived of in two different ways. On the one hand, some claim
that, due to his ultra-democratic position, Rousseau had to endorse violence,
as for instance when he in his discussion of majority rule ends up by
claiming that those who do not agree with the majority must be ‘forced to