Rousseau and Revolution

6 Rousseau and Revolution
Needless to say, Bachofen’s motivation for making both these moves is not
merely of historical interest but also of concern for contemporary politics.
Even though it might not be polite to interpret one of the contributors to
this anthology (doing to him what he does himself to Rousseau), it might
be claimed that Bachofen urges us to fi nd a middle course between two
tendencies in modern French politics and especially intellectual life, that is,
on the one hand, a Sarkozist liberalist conservatism, and, on the other
hand, different Marxist or anarchist traditions. In the search for such a
third position, it is obviously an advantage to have Rousseau on your side.
In this whole enumeration of different conceptions of Rousseau’s relation
to democracy and violence, a very recent interpretation of Rousseau should
be mentioned, namely, the one briefl y sketched out by Jonathan Israel in
his Radical Enlightenment. Similarly to Bachofen and Spitz, Israel claims that
Rousseau’s place in a specifi c republican tradition has been overlooked,
and that he does thus not belong to a Lockean tradition of natural right.
However, the republicanism referred to by Israel is not the one referred to
by Bachofen and Spitz, that is, the Pocockian ‘classical’ or ‘Atlantic’ republicanism,
but instead a ‘democratic republicanism’ inspired by Spinoza, the
so-called radical Enlightenment that, together with materialism and anticlericalism,
propagated radically egalitarian ideas. Thus, according to Israel,
Rousseau did not really, as in Bachofen’s and Spitz’s view, render a tradition
more democratic than it was, but rather inferred his radically democratic
views from ideas already inherent to the radical strain of the Enlightenment,
ideas to which, moreover, he was also sometimes opposed:
Any proper appreciation of Rousseau’s role and greatness has to concede
that his thought springs from a long, and almost obsessive dialogue with the
radical ideas of the past – in many cases as fi ltered through the mind of his
former comrade Diderot (Israel, 2002, 718).
And then, just adding to the complexity of both Rousseau himself and his
reception, Israel, in a later work, describes how ‘Rousseau’s political goals
all tended to an agenda that the radical philosophes [ . . . ] in varying degrees
deplored and consciously strove to avoid’ (Israel, 2010, 63–4), not least his
alleged preference for direct democracy.
Philosophy and Political Change
The question of philosophy’s part in social or political change is a controversial
and contested debate. Philosophers, historians and social scientists
debate the interrelationship between ideas, structures and societael