Rousseau and Revolution

8 Rousseau and Revolution
changing uses? To take another example, one might claim that one of the
advantages of religious texts such as the Bible is that they are so ambivalent
that they can be used for a lot of different religious and political purposes.
In the same way, Lauritsen claims that Rousseau’s concept of the general will
has an inherent ambiguity which makes it fi t for conceptualizing the different
and contradictory developments that insurrectional and revolutionary
movements often go through (Lauritsen, Chapter 6). The complexity of
Rousseau’s work can either be dismissed as incoherence or one can, as
Lauritsen both does and shows others do, be pushed into different directions,
or perhaps one should rather say that his theory opens up for various
practical resolutions of the paradoxes, contradictions and imperfections
that his theory reveals in our basic political and social patterns.
The open-ended interpretative possibilities or the ways in which his work
is eminently open for politicizisation is also demonstrated by Bertel Nygaard
in his article on the Danish reception and characterization of Rousseau
between 1750 and 1850 (Nygaard, Chapter 7). Nygaard shows how Rousseau
was in a sense an empty space, even in a peripheral part of Europe at
the time, in which to project ideas and positions in the public debate. The
name and categorization of ‘Rousseau’ then becomes for the historian a
way to understand the articulation and emergence of a political culture and
language in the period. Nygaard shows how the French Revolution in a
sense radicalized and politicized the reading of Rousseau, making it per
t inent for subsequent readings to deal with the question of his authorship
of the revolution – ‘whether by idolizing Rousseau as the philosophical
hero of revolution or, less publicly, by condemning him as a rabble-rousing
scoundrel’ (ibid.) – but also how the position on the revolution coloured
the reading of Rousseau himself.
Most if not all of the articles in this book as well as the positive and negative
evaluations of Rousseau’s ‘part’ in the French and subsequent revolutions
take it as evident that ideas matter, that philosophy matters. There is
no innocence in thought. Theory has or can be made to have practical
consequences. A purely materialist reading of revolutions or social change
is hard to come by, especially today. We may debate the relevance of ideas
and philosophy compared to other factors; we may haggle over who deserves
blame or praise, but almost everyone would agree that it matters what we
think, who and how we read. And, again, this is most emphatically true
when it comes to Rousseau who himself placed great importance in ideas
(perhaps mainly to destroy established and cherished mores) and to the
evaluation of Rousseau. Larger readings of him must answer the question
of authorship. Just as the French Revolution became one of the constitutive
dividing lines of political ideologies in Europe, so did the reading and