Rousseau and Revolution

General Will between Conservation and Revolution 103
Now, it could be maintained that Rousseau was actually aware of the possibility
of such an anarchist reading. Thus, after having claimed, as quoted
above, that ‘as soon as there is a master, there is no more sovereign’, he
makes a restriction:
This is not to say that the commands of the chiefs may not be taken for
general wills as long as the sovereign is free to oppose them and does not
do so. In such a case the people’s consent has to be presumed from universal
silence. (Ibid., 57–8)
This idea is quite sophisticated and seems both to render the anarchist
reading more likely and to bring it nearer to a somewhat practicable kind
of politics. While Rousseau maintains that it is always legitimate for the
people to oppose a political decision made by a political leader, for instance,
a representative, he underscores that this does not mean that every such
decision is illegitimate. In fact, as long as the people do not revolt against
such decisions, they should be considered as legitimate. However, as the
absence of revolt can obviously be due to repression, Rousseau adds that
the people must be ‘free to oppose’ a decision or a command, that is to say,
free to revolt. It thus seems that, as a correlate to what is here called (deliberately
anachronistically) the ‘radical anarchist’ reading of Rousseau, it is
possible to construct a more ‘moderate’ or ‘realistic’ anarchist reading.
This reading too, however, contains several problems. In particular, it
should be asked what is actually meant when ‘a people’ is said to be free to
revolt? Does it mean that the people have the right to revolt? Such an interpretation
seems contradictory, revolts being by defi nition illegal. Nevertheless,
Rousseau might have thought of such a solution. As a matter of fact,
when discussing the Constitution of Poland, he praises a specifi c law that
could be understood as a legitimation of revolt. This law provides that
under certain circumstances it is possible to create a so-called confederative
diet where for instance the normal right of veto does not apply, and, when
Rousseau states that ‘this federative form [ . . . ] strikes me as a masterpiece
of politics’ (Rousseau, 1997a, 219–20), it is, according to Sven Stelling-
Michaud, exactly because he ‘sees in this practice a legal form of insurrection’
(Stelling-Michaud, 1978, 1778).
As mentioned, popular uprisings during the French Revolution were often
if not explicitly referring to Rousseau’s critique of representation, then compatible
with it. Other initiatives during the revolution in fact pointed towards
this legalization or institutionalization of revolts that Rousseau saw in the