Rousseau and Revolution

Introduction 7
change – and everyone eagerly assigns praise and blame to various thinkers
for this or that development. Rousseau has been the epicentre for this
kind of debate for more than 200 years, centred round, albeit not exclusively,
the French Revolution as the most monumental social and political
change in modern history. Was Rousseau its ‘author’ or did he just become
the convenient target of attack for anti-radicals then and since? The relations
between Rousseau and the question and organization of political
change is a privileged place to investigate the much broader question of
what role philosophy can have and should have in generating alternatives.
To answer what role Rousseau played is also to start answering what role
philosophy in general can have.
During the French revolution Rousseau was alleged by both some of its
protagonists and its opponents to be its ‘author’ (as Louis-Sébastien Mercier
claims, cf. Swenson, 2000, ix). Hardly any philosopher has ever experienced
such an adoration as did Rousseau during the French Revolution. Obviously,
it can be discussed whether this was a real infl uence, or if the revolutionaries
did (on purpose?) misunderstand Rousseau and used him for
what they wanted in order to have either a saint or a political guarantee/
reference. The name of Rousseau became one of the ways to mark out
political positions and oppositions. Rousseau reduced to a name, a reference
disconnected from its person and work, is the destiny, one could say,
of many whose name becomes a shorthand for a particular position and
this then becomes what people ‘know’ about the bearer of the name. This
is wonderfully illustrated by Fayçal Falaky in his article on Rousseau as the
saviour of people who never read him but who knew, or thought they knew,
of him (Falaky, Chapter 5). His name ‘had become commonplace, but so
was the risk of his misinterpretation’ (ibid.). Falaky shows how Rousseau
was linked to the events of the French Revolution in an attempt to ‘anchor
their ideological beliefs on a philosophical foundation’ (ibid.) that they
may or may not have read. The article also shows that this may not have
been an innocent move because it, according to Falaky, ‘marked a setback
for science and rational empiricism and meant a sudden return to religious
and essentialist a priori tropes’ (ibid.). Falaky shows how we must complicate
the question of authorship because it may more properly be the spirit
or aura of Rousseau rather than his writings per se that was used to sanctify
the event.
If we take the view that the revolutionaries misused or deformed Rousseau’s
actual political thought, one might also ask why it was Rousseau that the revolutionaries
chose to misuse. In other words: Is there anything inherent in
Rousseau’s philosophy and concepts which makes them fi t for different and