Rousseau and Revolution

4 Rousseau and Revolution
be free’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 7). As Angelica Nuzzo points
out in Chapter 4, a subtle variant of this critique is developed by Hegel in
his Philosophy of Right, where he argues that the Terror was a consequence
of Rousseau’s idea that individuals’ egoistic and arbitrary wills can be completely
suppressed by an abstract concern for the common good. On the
other hand, others, for instance Julian Bourg in Chapter 3, insist that
Rousseau was in fact aware of the alleged dangers inherent in ‘excessive’
democracy, and that he warns against both revolutionary outbursts of
popu lar violence and, especially, the situation where the executive power,
the prince, presents himself as incarnating sovereignty and, in the name of
the people, installs a despotic regime.
Secondly, there is the idea that democracy is dependent on an initial revolutionary
violence. This violence, however, should be endorsed as the alternative
to a worse but mostly hidden or overseen violence, that is, tyranny and
repression. This argument has been adduced by radical thinkers from
Robespierre to Lenin. Most recently, Slavoj Žižek has repeated it in a distinction
between ‘subjective’ violence, that is, crime, terror and revolution,
and ‘objective’ violence, that is, either the ‘symbolic’ violence ‘embodied in
language’ or the ‘systemic’ violence resulting from ‘the smooth functioning
of our economic and political systems’ (Žižek, 2008, 1). As to Rousseau’s
position in this debate, it seems once again that there are two prevalent
readings. On the one hand, some claim that Rousseau’s arguments are very
much like those of Robespierre, Lenin and Žižek, and that ‘the act by which
a people is a people’ (Rousseau, 1997e, Book I, chapter 5) is an act of
benefi cent popular violence. With Rousseau’s words, ‘the popular insurrection
that ends in the death or deposition of a Sultan is as lawful an act as
those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and fortunes of his
subjects. As he was maintained by force alone, it is force alone that overthrows
him. Thus everything takes place according to the natural order’
(Rousseau, 1997b, 191). On the other hand, others claim that Rousseau did
not fully grasp the radical consequences of his own democratic theory.
Thus, Jane Anna Gordon claims that ‘Rousseau oscillates between radical
irreverence and cold feet’ (Gordon, Chapter 2) and that the necessary concrete
implications of Rousseau’s intuitions about the violent character of
the establishment of national self-determination were only understood by
later radical political theorists such as Frantz Fanon.
The third conception of the relationship between violence and democracy
might be the most widespread. It is the idea that democracy is basically the
opposite of violence, the latter being a fundamental feature of despotic regimes
only. Or one might say that real democracy is non- or anti-violence. Again