Rousseau and Revolution

Introduction 5
we fi nd two versions of this applied to Rousseau. The fi rst position portrays
Rousseau as anti-democratic, perhaps even totalitarian, and his political
project, especially the notion of the general will, opens up for or legitimizes
violent despotic rule. This is the conservative, Burkean reading of Rousseau
by, for instance, Jacob Talmon in his 1952 book The Origins of Totalitarian
Democracy. In the other position, Rousseau, according to Blaise Bachofen,
represents a certain republican conception of democracy which, in opposition
to the liberal tradition, especially Locke, is sceptical of violent popular
uprisings and revolutions. More specifi cally, Bachofen claims that Rousseau’s
republican conception of democracy is more concerned about ‘the moral
precondition for freedom’, that is, a long and diffi cult education of the
people by which a sum of particular wills is converted into a general will,
than about the act of liberation from tyranny. ‘The free people is not – or is
not only – a people who frees itself from subjugation by a violent act. The
free people is the one who is morally capable of freedom, who is educated
towards freedom.’ (Bachofen, Chapter 1).
Whether one or another of these many readings of Rousseau is the right
one should not be determined here. From the point of view of intellectual
history, however, Bachofen’s interpretation is interesting in so far as it –
partly inspired by another French scholar in political philosophy, Jean-
Fabien Spitz (1995, 341–465) – explicitly links Rousseau to the so-called
republican tradition in Western political thought (Bachofen, 2002, 15).
This tradition has had a revival in the last decades and is represented by
neo-republican scholars such as J. G. A. Pocock (1975), Quentin Skinner
(1999), Phillip Pettit (1997) and Maurizio Viroli (2002). In this mainly
anglophone tradition, however, Rousseau has most often been either forgotten
or considered as identical with some kind of tyrannical populist majoritarianism
(‘Rousseau is probably responsible for having given currency to
[ . . . ] a populist view’, (Pettit, 1997, 30)) opposed to the balanced spirit of
true republicanism.
On the other hand, by showing how Rousseau does in fact belong to the
republican tradition, Bachofen seems to makes a double move. On the one
hand, Rousseau’s democratic theory is made republican (that is, republican in
the moderate sense given to this word by Pocock, Skinner, Pettit, Viroli,
etc.) and is thus being differentiated from other conceptions of democracy
put forward by socialists, radicals and revolutionaries who traditionally
claim to have Rousseau on their side. On the other hand, the republican
tradition is made more democratic than it is when presented by the mentioned
neo-republicans who most often do not, as Rousseau, regard popular
sovereignty as a condition of the legitimacy of any political society.